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Gurman: Apple Event on March 8, At Least Four M2 Macs to Launch Later This Year
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M1 Pro/Max Mac mini desktops would be a perfect fit...!
Latest rumors (as mentioned in the article this thread is about) have the larger iMac desktops coming late Summer / early Fall...?
Apple silicon Mac Pro, I would expect preview at WWDC this year, availability end-of-year at the latest...
I think rainbow colors might be introduced with a possible "consumer chassis" & M2 introduction this Fall...?
I would hope Apple will offer the M1 Pro/Max Mac mini in both Silver & Space Gray...!
The 2019 Intel Mac Pro will probably get a refresh (new mobo / Ice Lake Xeon CPUs / fasster RAM / PCIe Gen4 slots / W7000-series MPX GPUs) and continue to be sold for a few more years, but I doubt it would receive any hardware updates after that...
Apple will preview and release an Apple silicon powered Mac Pro this year, the final product to complete the transition...
I also want a Space Gray M1 Max Mac mini desktop...!
I feel if there is a redesign, it might split the Mac mini lineup into two chassis; one smaller variant with multi-colors for the Mn entry level SoCs, and the current chassis in Silver & Space Gray for the Mn Pro/Max mid/high-end SoCs...
If there were not going to be a mid/high-end Mac mini, the 2018 Intel model would have been removed from the webstore when the M1 Mac mini debuted...
I would expect rainbow colors to come to both the consumer-oriented (Mn-series SoCs) Mac mini and new Apple displays; and Apple makes more money off of the sale of a Mac mini & Apple display than they do off of an iMac sale...
Hey you know those M1 Pros and M1 Max we just released? If you think those devices are powerful, wait until you see what's coming next.
Osborne effect - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
How does the Osbourne Effect take place if the "what's coming next" variants are more M1 Pro/Max powered products...?
Uh, yeah, once they update the Mac mini this Fall... the Mn-series SoCs are the entry-level / consumer SoCs; the Mn Pro/Max SoCs are the mid/high-end / prosumer SoCs...
PCIe slots might still be useful to all the audio folks out there, for one example...
With Apple silicon and the whole Unified Memory Architecture thing, I can only think of the O2 workstation...!
Apple invested 3 million into Arm because they wanted it in the Newton...
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, they were about three months from bankruptcy...
People always say the 150 million Microsoft invested in Apple at that time was what saved Apple from bankruptcy, but it is really the 1.1 billion Steve Jobs sold some of their Arm holdings for that kept Apple out of bankruptcy...
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Which is what I'm hoping.
But you can see why I'm wary. Getting a boost switching platform is sorta expected, and M1 is a good SoC, no doubt. The interesting thing will be the advantages M2 will have over M1. That will give a baseline for what to expect from the M-series going forward.
The M1 was launched in November 2020. Two years after that would be November 2022, which is... "later this year."
As for whether that's "too soon," the iPad Pro has been updated (along with a new CPU generation in all but one instance) quite consistently every 1 year and 4 months, give or take. That seems to be good enough for consumers, and the iPad Pro is priced similarly to the Macs that now use the same CPU. If the lighter-weight Mac laptops (or even the iPad Pro itself, with the most-power-efficient M-series processor) settle into a similar cadence, we'd be due for one some time this spring.
The MacBook Air itself has been upgraded on average once every 400 days; those upgrades usually included a new generation of CPU, and it seemed to have worked well enough for people buying them. It's been 453 days since the current model was released, so in terms of past Intel averages, it's already due for an upgrade. Intel's roadmap is kind of a mess, but I believe they're targeting a roughly 1.5-year cycle for new CPU generations.
That's ignoring the iPhone and associated A-series CPUs. Apple seems to have done just fine releasing a new one of each once a year, every year, for over a decade.
The timeline of the A##X CPUs seems to provide some idea of what Apple's chip team has done with higher-performance parts in the past, which is a new high-performance CPU based on the core of roughly every other A-series release. That cadence seems to align pretty well with the standard rate of Mac updates. It'll be a little unusual seeing the low-power CPU architecture being consistently updated before the Pro architecture, but Intel does that too, it's just not as conspicuous because of the naming scheme.
Launching into ill-informed and random speculation:
One thing that might mix things up over the next year or so is if Apple doesn't feel like the M1 Pro and M1 Max can outshine the existing high-end Intel-based machines dramatically enough, so need an M2 Pro/Max/Whatever before they can move the Mac Pro, or high-end iMacs, or resurrect the iMac Pro, to Apple Silicon. If so, they'll presumably be in a rush to get the M2 out the door, so it's possible they'd base it on the A15 core rather than waiting for the A16 core to be ready.
I could see why that might happen. I have a top-of-the-line 27" iMac from 2020 (which is still top-of-the-line), and while my shiny new M1 Max MBP pretty much matches its performance at a fraction of the heat and power, it does only pretty much match it. The M1/M1 Max/M1 Pro MacBook Air/Pros were all uniformly huge upgrades over their Intel predecessors. Releasing a 27" iMac with the same M1 Max as what's in the MBP isn't going to look like as dramatic an improvement at all, and indeed the max RAM would be only half of what the current 27" iMacs support (less than half if you include graphics RAM).
The wildcard is if Apple adds an M1 Max Extra (or M1X Pro, or whatever) desktop version with even more cores and 128GB (or more) of unified memory. Or if they can get dual CPU configurations working, although with the unified architecture I'm not even sure what that would look like. Either would be a surprise, but not impossible.
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PCIe slots will still be needed, audio DSP cards being one of the best examples...
Six T4/USB4 ports make more sense, especially since a dual M1 Max SoC configuration could support up to eight...
A single 10Gb Ethernet port makes no sense, the 2019 Intel Mac Pro & the 2017 Intel Mac Pro both had dual Ethernet ports available...
"Gigantic external power brick", why...? Does it fit with the Apple design ethos in the least...? Is a fat power brick really needed for a decidedly desktop machine...?!?
There are rumors of a top end M1 ??? SoC, beyond the M1 Pro/Max offerings, supposedly with 12 performance cores & no efficiency cores; designed specifically for desktop usage...?
As for "unified memory", LPDDR5X is debuting later this year:
- pin-compatible with current LPDDR5
- up to 64GB chips
- 33% faster than LPDDR5
- 20% lower power usage than LPDDR5
- M1 Max SoC = 256GB RAM / 500GB/s UMA
- Dual M1 Max SoCs = 512GB RAM / 1TB/s UMA
- Quad M1 Max SoCs = 1TB RAM / 2TB/s UMA
Any redesign of the Mac Mini will I suspect put Data Center needs quite high up there given the amount they sell through that channel. This is why I think things like multi-colour may not be so likely.
Data Center would most likely opt for at least the M1 Pro SoCs for the higher CPU core count & UMA bandwidth, so they would stay with the current chassis (maybe a slight change to that for the plexi top & better WiFi/BT activity); as to multi-colors, I would expect those to stay with the Mn-series SoC powered consumer/entry-level Mac mini offerings in a possibly smaller chassis...
I'm the same re. some kind of souped-up Mac Mini. It p*sses me off that Apple can't seem to take a sh-t without needing to announce it beforehand at a 'pomp-and-circumstance' fanfare event. Apple: Just put the M1 Pro or Max into the Mac Mini already. We don't need a fanfare every six months just for you to put a chip you already make into a machine you already make. We're totally fine if you just go ahead and launch it, then put some banner on the Apple homepage to say you've done it. Seriously.
I feel the minute I blow a wad on the current M1 MacMini they'll almost instantly replace it with the one I want to buy.
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I want a 15-inch Mac Book Non-Pro. Chassis, weight and thickness of the old 15-MBP.
Edit: I don't need all these video and photo processor cores.
Edit: I don't need all these video and photo processor cores.
I remember when the HomePod first released, people were complaining that ‘It didn’t have a screen’. And then the question was, ‘Why would the HomePod need a screen, if you’re never actually looking at it for the majority of time’
Anyways, my point is, I don’t think the HomePod relies on the success of having a screen or not, when I suspect the audible feedback is perfectly fine for the majority of consumers. If it had a screen, that would just cost additional in hardware, which Apple would pass on to the consumer, making the HomePod even more expensive than it already was originally.
The HomePod never needed a screen, what it really needed, was more proper marketing expose truly that it was more than just a ‘smart speaker’, it was a quality music player first.
...which could turn out to be just a 'binned' dual M1 Max. If you discount the efficiency cores then the dual M1 Max would have 16 cores total, so a 12, and 14 and core "binned" options wouldn't be unrealistic - and just disabling the efficiency cores on the existing M1 Max die, so that essentially the same die could be used from the MBP through to the Mac Pro would probably be more economical than designing a whole new die just for low-volume desktops.
The Homepod was pointless unless you were committed to the Apple/iTunes/Music ecosystem anyway (which was the deal-breaker for me) - so the vast majority of customers would have had an iPhone or iPad to act as the Homepod's "screen" when needed. That puts the screen where it should be: right in front of you when you're sitting in the comfy chair.
Apart from the "PC/Android/third party HiFi users need not apply" decision that immediately narrows the market, the Homepod was a marketing failure in that everybody saw it as competing with dirt cheap
(*or 'not quite the massive profit that we usually get-leaders' but that doesn't roll off the tongue so well...)
I waited like half a year for the new macbook pros last year just for them to come with a notch on the display which put me off completely. So jarring.
I agree, but the Pro moniker pretty much went out the window when with “iPhone Pro” so not surprised it’s basically meaningless now.
2025: Apple announces “Cleaning Cloth Pro”
You may be right. I think it will be between 18-24 months. Like you, I won't be upset if it's once every 2 years, i.e. M<x> , M<x> Pro/Max, M<x+1>, M<x+1> Pro/Max, once every year.
That would align with my personal upgrade pattern of 4-6 years. 4 years if there are significant advantages, otherwise 6.
Trust me, you hardly notice the notch after a couple of hours' use. A lot of the apps have dark menu backgrounds in any case, so you so don't see it.
It's really a non-issue.
The Pro moniker has had only superficial meaning since 2009, when they took the aluminum MacBook from 2008 and repackaged it with a FireWire port and a backlit keyboard and called it “Pro”.
