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Could We See a 16-inch MacBook Pro Announcement Today?

We already knew based on current 15-inch MacBook Pro shipping estimates, the 16-inch won’t be launching until mid-November.

Right now, the 4TB option for 15-inch has a 3-4 week delay. You can expect the 16-inch to launch around then.
 
turbineseaplane said:
@theluggage

Thank you for that post so none of the rest of us had to do it.

I'm also exhausted with the horrendously bad (and incorrect) takes on the history of port/feature removals by Apple.
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I should remember to save it as a re-usable template, along with the rebuttals of other old favourites like "Steve saved Apple by cutting the product range", "Jobs wanted to make everything sealed and non-user-upgradable" and the perennial non-even-wrong "An original 128K Mac cost a squillion dollars in today's money" (at least two of which I've seen in the last 24 hours) :)
 
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I remember seeing stuff getting launch like 4:00pm EST in the past. So I am thinking that we will see the Catalina update first then the new machine launch. Then we will have people see the price and say OMG this laptop is so expensive. I know i could build one myself for less :)
 
theluggage said:
Sigh. This again.

(a) The iMac was pretty much a new line (apart from some formerly-known-as-Performa designs that were failing to sell) - it didn't leave existing customers in the lurch. The G3 tower kept the floppy and old ports (or, at leasts, slots that could take them) for longer.

(b) It was a desktop machine, so having a floppy-on-a-string (if you even needed it) wasn't such a big deal as with a laptop.

(c) Floppies were well and truly obsolete and almost unusably small by then, when people had hard drives that could fit several thousand floppies. Floppies etc. were already being phased out of the laptop line - first as removable modules that could be replaced by extra batteries or Zip drives, then optional removable modules. If it would fit on a floppy it would fit in an email. People were using a mess of Zip drives, Syquests, optically-tracked 'superfloppies' and CD-Rs but with no one clear winner there was no obvious removable storage device to include.

I know when all my colleagues switched to PowerBook Tis I made the mistake of ordering floppy drives with each one - most of those ended up in cupboards, about 1 drive per 4 Macs would have been fine.

(d) The other ports that were lost included ADB (proprietary - with USB suddenly you could use any mouse and keyboard with a USB port and, yes, mice were coming with USB then - remember all those green USB-to-PS/2 dongles?) - localtalk (proprietary, and totally obsoleted by 10BaseT Ethernet) - RS423 (technically standard but annoyingly different from the de-facto standard RS232 and far inferior to USB) and SCSI (Increasingly only supported by expensive server-grade drives, plus: terminators and device IDs anybody?)

So, no, "Steve removed ports from the iMac" is not a justification for removing USB-A or SD-Cards when those formats are still at the height of their popularity, and the alternatives are just the old technologies packaged in a new connector.
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For the pro-focused laptops like the PowerBook or MacBook Pro, it was always a more gradual transition to newer standards. For example, when Thunderbolt became available in 2011, it was clearly superior to FireWire 800. However, the FireWire port stuck around. The Retina models released the following year did do away with FireWire, but by then we'd been given almost a year and a half of notice that FireWire had been superseded.

With the 2016 MacBook Pros, there was no gradual transition. It went from no USB-C to suddenly all USB-C. And it was more than just one standard replacing another; MagSafe, Thunderbolt, USB-A, SD card slot, HDMI were all gone in favor of USB-C. This kind of hard transition on pro-focused hardware isn't something Apple ever did before. It's unique. There is nothing from the past to compare it to.
 
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Zdigital2015 said:
Although the A10X Fusion is competent and has excellent Metal scores, Apple Arcade is going to be the driving force for the next big update to the AppleTV. I would expect additional DRAM and storage more than 64GB to be able to hold more games as Arcade allows downloads online/offline play and up to six family members.
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Not sure how they're gonna handle Apple Arcade, to be honest. Console games tend to match one particular device generation; my guess is Apple Arcade does the same: your game needs to run on any of:

  • an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 13
  • an iPad running iOS 13
  • an Apple TV running tvOS 13
  • a Mac running macOS 10.15 Catalina

That includes, say, the iPhone 6S, which runs an Apple A9. So I don't think Apple Arcade is going to be the driving factor to a newer Apple TV any time soon.

Zdigital2015 said:
Throw in Bluetooth 5.0 and 802.11AX (iPhone 11/Pro/ProMax now have this) and a better remote and that’s the recipe for a newer up to date AppleTV 4K. To me, 2020 makes sense for this, if not this year even. I guess we’ll see how it shakes out.
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Yeah, but Bluetooth and Wi-Fi alone surely aren't enough for any kind of press event, and probably not even enough for any release at all.

The remote is interesting, though. I don't have one myself, but it seems to have a controversial reputation. Not sure they can meaningfully revise it without significant changes (yet again!) to tvOS, though?
 
It is of course possible that new MBP icon got removed from the betas because it was going to launch soon, but now isn't...

:confused:👎
 
turbineseaplane said:
@theluggage

Thank you for that post so none of the rest of us had to do it.

I'm also exhausted with the horrendously bad (and incorrect) takes on the history of port/feature removals by Apple.
Click to expand...
SD cards are going nowhere anytime soon.

For a company that likes to brag how it is "Photographer" and artist friendly, you would think they would have at least one full-size SD slot.
 
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SpeedyTheSnail said:
SD cards are going nowhere anytime soon.

For a company that likes to brag how it is "Photographer" and artist friendly, you would think they would have at least one full-size SD slot.
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Yeah, the SD card and I would have liked to have seen a single USB-A on the side (at least on a 15" machine), especially looking at it from 2015-2016 eyes (when this port stripping started).

USB-A thumb drives, peripheral dongles, cables - they are just everywhere, still, and will be for a long long time. It's just a quality of life nicety to not be worrying about connectors and dongles to do simple things.

That's the sort of thought and care about the user experience we used to laud and love Apple for.
 
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turbineseaplane said:
Yeah, the SD card and I would have liked to have seen a single USB-A on the side (at least on a 15" machine), especially looking at it from 2015-2016 eyes (when this port stripping started).

USB-A thumb drives, peripheral dongles, cables - they are just everywhere, still, and will be for a long long time. It's just a quality of life nicety to not be worrying about connectors and dongles to do simple things.

That's the sort of thought and care about the user experience we used to laud and love Apple for.
Click to expand...


I was almost most excited to upgrade from my 2007 MB to the 2012 MBP because of the SD card reader. No more having to make sure I remembered my dongle. All of my cameras are SD and yet I'm back to living the card reader dongle life.
 
powerslave12r said:
This has to be the best kept rumor in a while.
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lol

One could imagine Tim looking at us all lusting for this and discussing icon leaks and thinking..

"New MacBookPro? - Ha!"

"Instead we have the new iPad Pro 11.3" with a new chip, and a slightly modified form factor that requires all new non compatible peripherals and starts at $1299 for 64GB" - "it's the future of computing and we think you're going to love it""
 
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YaBe said:
I do not see them releasing a new form factor without fanfare... a silent update would be a speed bump, a new model def deserve at least a keynote :p
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A keynote just for a bigger screen, update to an older keyboard mechanism, and maybe a bit faster processor? I doubt it.
Unless they also announce updates for the iMac line as well.
Around the last March, Apple announced a week of updates in several products, though all were kind of lame updates...and no keynote
 
Klatti said:
But a good way to skip discussion about the new keyboard and it’s reasons 😉
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Excellent point - but I bet you will see phrasing on their behalf that captures only positives. And I bet they won't call it a "scissors" keyboard, but something even newer and better. Like "butterfly Pro - we took all of the amazing features people loved about butterfly keyboards, and made them even better, by making them comfortable to type on, quiet, and able to function for more than 2 years without a repair."

Think of the way they marketed FaceID - hammering on all the things you could do with FaceID that you could already do with TouchID. And they might show a little humility - something like "not everyone was fond of the butterfly keyboard".
 
Why would they keep the 15(.4)” if the 16” is so close, basically the same size, and its obvious successor? Oh that’s right: Apple’s segmentation and trickle-down strategy (thanks Tim). Same reason they now offer so many bloody iPhone models: so they can push the price of the best into “ultra premium” territory despite typically only incremental improvements. If you can’t or don’t want to pay Apple’s ever increasing prices on its latest and greatest you have to buy year or years old tech with only minor reductions in price. No wonder they’re a trillion dollar company hey?

Are they going to call this the MacBook Pro Pro?
 
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