Apple's Upcoming Hardware Refresh to Include Thunderbolt LED Display, Not MacBook

[AnthonyHarris]

Gosh

More B.S., I will not believe any of these silly rumors. The MacBook is the U.S. Apple Store's 5th best selling product. I do not believe they are getting rid of it! The MBA isn't even on the list of the top selling products.

If the 11 and 13 inch Macbook Air suddenly got much... much cheaper and replaced the white Macbook, it would soon be in the list of top selling products.

I've never understood why they were so expensive, even with the SSD, but what do I know.

Anyway. While its annoying, B.S. is the nature of this site. More and more rumours are, well, less of a rumour and more fact due to product parts leaking, but not everything is going to be correct and nothing is set in stone until Apple say so.

Sorry to be so patronising, but hey, you're getting upset over rumours.

 

[Bo98]

The MC914 images have been removed from Apple's site.

 

[justperry]

It was probably the U2311H. I purchased an ASUS PA246Q myself. It is much cheaper than the comparable U2410.

F&^%, that display is Ugly

And the ASUS PA246Q is not much better either.

 

[heffer2k02]

Can someone explain how this works?
Cinema Display resolution = 2560x1440 x 3 (RGB) = 11,059,200 bytes per frame.

x 60hz = 663,552,000 bytes per second.
x 2 displays = 1,327,104,000 bytes per second.
x 8 bits = 10,616,832,000 bits per second which > thunderbolt at 10gbps.

There can't be any compression because you can always imagine the worst case uncompressable image.

 

[quarx]

I hope Apple uses a built-in GPU right into ACDs in the future. With Thunderbolt, that could be the solution for the Intel HD 3000 problem. It seems the perfect solution at least while people are connected to their ACDs. It would make Macs a heck of a lot more powerful like the new Sony Vaio Z with external GPU in the media dock.

Although that sounds tempting, I wouldn't bet on it. Remember that one Thunderbolt controller only provides four PCIe 2.0 lanes, thereby severely limiting the performance of external graphics cards connected via Thunderbolt. Internal GPUs are usually connected via 16 lanes.

 

[FoxMcCloud]

Steve, you have done it again! Simple genius. Sit down windows, this display shows why you are declining.

I literally have no idea what this means.

Anyway, Thunderbolt across all Macs. Inevitable.

 

[irnchriz]

That desktop wallpaper is the default one from Lion after doing a scratch install.

 

[JPTech]

Hmm... I seem to have missed all this missing-from-the-store-broken-link hooey. I noticed that all the current Cinema Display images are essentially identical to the current ones, except of course for the wallpaper on the display and the Mac Mini: it has a disc drive in the current image, it does not in the "new" image. So I guess we'll be seeing a Mac Mini refresh.

 

[drewyboy]

Link provided for the acd is broken again.

 

[Piggie]

Have Apple, in Lion, fixed the problem that say you have a small app running on screen in the lower right of the 2nd monitor to the right of your iMac.
To get to it's menu, you have to move your pointer all the way up to the top of the monitor of the 1st screen on the left?

 

[OllyW]

Hmm... I seem to have missed all this missing-from-the-store-broken-link hooey. I noticed that all the current Cinema Display images are essentially identical to the current ones, except of course for the wallpaper on the display and the Mac Mini: it has a disc drive in the current image, it does not in the "new" image. So I guess we'll be seeing a Mac Mini refresh.

It could just be showing the Mac mini server.

 

[JPTech]

It could just be showing the Mac mini server.

Yeah, looking around, I just realized that.

 

[paulloewen]

No one saw this coming??

When they introduced the new MacBook Airs last time, they used the tag line, "The Next Generation of MacBooks." Given that generation is the used to designate product cycles all the time, my immediate thought was: "they'll replace the white MacBook with the Airs next time." Looks like that is probably the case. Don't know whether they'll change the name to MacBook, but it looks like Apple's lineup will be all aluminum from here on out.

 

[zedsdead]

Hmm... I seem to have missed all this missing-from-the-store-broken-link hooey. I noticed that all the current Cinema Display images are essentially identical to the current ones, except of course for the wallpaper on the display and the Mac Mini: it has a disc drive in the current image, it does not in the "new" image. So I guess we'll be seeing a Mac Mini refresh.

If you look at the cord it only has two plugs instead of three. This is a change and shows there will be no USB needed to run from the Cinema Display into the computer. Everything is passed through the Thunderbolt Port except for power.

 

[Piggie]

It could just be showing the Mac mini server.

Image

I've only just read this for the 1st time on that link

Instead of a SuperDrive, there are two 500GB 7200-rpm hard drives that give you all the storage you need to help your group work more efficiently than ever.

Is that some kind of a joke?

A $1000 device fitted with two 500GB drives?

When $80 will buy you one 2TB fast and low power Green Drive.

 

[drewyboy]

I've only just read this for the 1st time on that link

Instead of a SuperDrive, there are two 500GB 7200-rpm hard drives that give you all the storage you need to help your group work more efficiently than ever.

Is that some kind of a joke?

A $1000 device fitted with two 500GB drives?

When $80 will buy you one 2TB fast and low power Green Drive.

These are 2.5" drives not 3.5". So yeah its going to be more for the laptop drives, but still not too much. Reason it's more expensive is that it includes Osx server. Which for SL is $500. A lot of ppl are wondering how apple is going to price it now that lion server is a $50 upgrade, if you already had the $500 SL server.

 

[jonnysods]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/9A5259f)

So no daisy chaining any of the 24's or existing ACD's?

 

[Piggie]

These are 2.5" drives not 3.5". So yeah its going to be more for the laptop drives, but still not too much. Reason it's more expensive is that it includes Osx server. Which for SL is $500. A lot of ppl are wondering how apple is going to price it now that lion server is a $50 upgrade, if you already had the $500 SL server.

Ah ok, I understand.
Looks like it's $132 for the drives then.
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1310822207&sr=1-2

To be honest, it still seems a LOT of money for such a small amount of storage and the server OS. They should really put together something of much better value so that many more people would buy it.

 

[manu chao]

Ah ok, I understand.
Looks like it's $132 for the drives then.
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1310822207&sr=1-2

To be honest, it still seems a LOT of money for such a small amount of storage and the server OS. They should really put together something of much better value so that many more people would buy it.

You are complaining about the wrong thing, a Mac mini with 2.66 GHz, 4 GB RAM and one 500 GB drive costs $999.
Switch out the optical drive for a second 500 GB drive and Apple throws in the server OS for free. Snow Leopard server costs standalone $499.

Now, have a look what Microsoft charges for its server version of Windows (and how many clients you serve with the cheapest versions of it).

You can complain about the base price of a Mac mini ($699), or the RAM upgrade price from 2 to 4 GB ($100) or the processor upgrade price ($150) or the harddrive upgrade from 320 to 500 GB ($50) but you cannot complain about price of Mac mini server package.

 

[deconstruct60]

If the 11 and 13 inch Macbook Air suddenly got much... much cheaper and replaced the white Macbook, it would soon be in the list of top selling products.

1. The 11" being the same price as the Macbook is the only reason it is not dead last in Mac sales. Before the two prong approach the MBA would be posted as below the Mac Pro on Apple's "best sellers" list. A rather poor showing for a product that costs about $1,000 less.

While doing an even lower limbo of the 11" would push the numbers up some more at some point the 11" would start to get entangled with the iPad's reserved price range.

Given the choice between tweaking the MBA 13" with more memory ( flash and RAM) in the base model and trying to radically shave costs ( -$300 ) I bet Apple goes with the "increase value proposition and keep price the same" route.

It is unlikely either the 11" or 13" will move much in price.


2. Apple could more likely shave $200 off a MBP 13" to come up with a "bargain" model more that reuses 90+% of the MBP 13" R&D costs to deliver something into the MacBook price point space. If Apple can shave $25 off the Aluminum case (or just made plastic one that takes that MBP 13" logic board), $50 off the CPU , $10 off disk drive, drop backlit keyboard, drop back to 2GB of RAM, etc. they would have a replacement and be back to just two laptop lines: MBA and MBP ( instead of the MB , MBA , and MBP ). All of that is done by just changes what is wrapped around and inserted into the basic internals.

I doubt many MacBook fans would be greatly upset with a MBP 13" model subsuming the MacBook. Apple sells the "last years" iPhone the following year as the "entry" model. They could do the same for the Macbook. It would be "last year's" MBP 13".

 

[Piggie]

You are complaining about the wrong thing, a Mac mini with 2.66 GHz, 4 GB RAM and one 500 GB drive costs $999.
Switch out the optical drive for a second 500 GB drive and Apple throws in the server OS for free. Snow Leopard server costs standalone $499.

Now, have a look what Microsoft charges for its server version of Windows (and how many clients you serve with the cheapest versions of it).

You can complain about the base price of a Mac mini ($699), or the RAM upgrade price from 2 to 4 GB ($100) or the processor upgrade price ($150) or the harddrive upgrade from 320 to 500 GB ($50) but you cannot complain about price of Mac mini server package.

But this is a home device.
Like Windows Home Server would be.

You'd not run a company on something like this.
We're looking at home user pricing for small devices with small storage.

 

[JPTech]

If you look at the cord it only has two plugs instead of three. This is a change and shows there will be no USB needed to run from the Cinema Display into the computer. Everything is passed through the Thunderbolt Port except for power.

Ahh, dammit, you're right. I coulda sworn there were only two. My mistake.

 

[deconstruct60]

Although that sounds tempting, I wouldn't bet on it. Remember that one Thunderbolt controller only provides four PCIe 2.0 lanes, thereby severely limiting the performance of external graphics cards connected via Thunderbolt. Internal GPUs are usually connected via 16 lanes.

While 4x is definitely smaller than 8x or 16x how much of impact will be determined by how much data swapping needs to be done between system RAM and the VRAM now inside the monitor. For gaming workloads where lots of textures are being moved up and leveraged on a ongoing basis it would be a problem. For workloads that loads a bit of data into VRAM at the beginning and then had the x86 cores and GPU cores both work in things highly independently it could work much better.

It won't solve the "high performance 3D" graphics problem. It may solve the drive huge screen without soaking up more of the limited memory bandwidth problem (stop the IGP from competing with the x86 cores).

The design problems with moving some "hardcore" GPU to the monitor is that it increase costs. If you try to push the limits it increases heat. It also makes the monitor useless with conventional graphics cards. ( it will only work with Macs. While a display port to mini display port adapter may be annoying.. you can make it work. ).

In the "monitor less" docking station solution, the monitor still hooks up with a convention connector so practically any monitor can be used. However, it would not be surprising to see Apple go with the relatively expensive "all-in-one" docking station solution that absorbs the monitor also.

 

[manu chao]

But this is a home device.
Like Windows Home Server would be.

You'd not run a company on something like this.
We're looking at home user pricing for small devices with small storage.

The Mac mini is not a home server, it is a tiny, elegant home server. These two are not the same category.

The Mac mini is smaller than a 3.5" external disk, if somebody wants a tiny home server, they can get the tinyness with it. If they don't want to pay for the tinyness, they get a 3.5" external disk.

 

[deconstruct60]

Question is, why did Apple bother putting a TB port on a machine that can't really make use of it? .

Because cables are "evil" to Apple. A two headed hydra cord is slightly less "evil" than a three headed one is.

It can be used as a docking station connector on a MBP 13". I think there are fair number of folks who will take the MBP on the road and then come home and plug the laptop into a keyboard/monitor combo on their desk.

Likewise, I guess you forgot all the wailing and moans of agony when the ExpresssCard socket got dropped. TB is far better ( 4x PCI-e v2.0 performance versus 1x v1.0 )

TB lack of utility is directly connected to the lack of external devices at the moment. That is a temporary situation. Perhaps by CES show next January the picture will be more clear. USB 3.0 will be the USB 2.0 successor and TB will be filling other roles (like docking stations, higher end AV capture, etc. ) that either proprietary cards or USB/eSATA combo sockets were filling.