Leaker Suggests New Apple Products Are 'Ready to Ship' Amid Rumors of Intel-Based iMac Refresh

[subjonas]

I don’t know... Beats as a brand aren’t inexpensive, and BeatsX are $100. I suppose Apple could add enough features to make an AirPods X worth $200. I don’t think they’d sell anywhere near as well as AirPods though.

BeatsX are $100 now but they’ve been out for coming up on 4 years unchanged. I believe $180 was the original release price for the first couple years. I don’t know if $200 is going to be the price of the Airpods X, but whether that prediction is off by a bit seems like a strange reason to write off its existence completely, unless it was more so because of the other factor you mentioned.
I don’t think they’re meant to outsell Airpods. They’re for a more niche market.

 

[Mac4Brains]

If Apple sells refreshed computers just before the ARM change, both Apple and users will have major issues to deal with.

#1) it will be the best selling computers that will pull sales from the ARM computers later for two reasons, one is, I myself (and I can’t be alone on this) never trust the first generation of anything, until they work out the bugs/issues first. And two, any Mac user that uses Bootcamp will jump on it while they can.

#2) I always tell people that the measuring stick for when it is truly time to get a new computer (even if the old one is still working fine, although slow) is when your ageing computer, of any kind, can not run the current System. Soon MacOS 11 will no longer support Intel chips so these refreshed computers will be forced into obsolescence faster than any other Mac in history. Perhaps only have a service life of as little as two years before it can no longer update to a current MacOS. And this is if even any of the MacOS 11 variants can run on any Intel Macs to start with. So, this may force Apple to make MacOS 11.0 to perhaps 11.2 backwards compatible with the intel Macs, making the transition more complicated for Apple.

 

[theadder]

At my location, Apple's online store is showing Aug 4 availability for 27" iMacs, but—this is interesting—it is showing July 22 availability for the 21.5" iMacs. That's tomorrow (Wednesday). Hmm.

The top tier 27” iMac is out into mid to late September.

 

[Realityck]

I don’t get it, why would you want a last gen intel Mac when all the software and everything is switching to arm based cpu. Why would you not wait and buy the arm based iMac. dont understand...

Give some examples where all the software and everything is switching to ARM based CPU and doing well? As a example looking at Huawei’s ARM-based desktop PC could leave you scratching your head.

typical for ARM-based systems. With 16GB of RAM and a Yeston Radeon RX550 graphics card, you’d presume this computer would fly. Unfortunately, it rendered a BMW 3D model in Blender for almost 12 minutes.

to get access to the UOS app store which had a very limited selection of software.

Those Two comments in bold might be what you'll run into. First the ARM while speedy in a iPhone or iPad Pro when running MacOS 11 might not be that efficient as a desktop when you push it. Next you have to contend with a very limited selection of software. Oh sure Rosetta 2 to the rescue, is it a satisfactory scenario to be stuck with stuff from what the App Store sells?

 

[tillsbury]

The top tier 27” iMac is out into mid to late September.

Good spotting! Just checked here in NZ on the apple store and the bottom end 27" imac is showing at 2-3 weeks, middle at 3-4 weeks, and top end at 8-9 weeks. That's very promising!

 

[pdmpolishing]

Good spotting! Just checked here in NZ on the apple store and the bottom end 27" imac is showing at 2-3 weeks, middle at 3-4 weeks, and top end at 8-9 weeks. That's very promising!

I think this situation is most likely due to a lack of products being produced due to Covid-19.

 

[aleni]

That imac mockup without the chin is really ugly. It looks like a monitor and it loses the iMac’s identity.

 

[CarlJ]

So, this may force Apple to make MacOS 11.0 to perhaps 11.2 backwards compatible with the intel Macs, making the transition more complicated for Apple.

Backwards compatible? You realize macOS 11.0 is running on Intel Macs right now, right?

 

[Mac4Brains]

well that explains why they are giving developers a Mini with a ARM chip while it is still in alpha stage of the OS.

and look at the list of unsupported Macs. I don't see any reason for the lack of support of any of the Intel "i" chips.

 

[CarlJ]

Give some examples where all the software and everything is switching to ARM based CPU and doing well? As a example looking at Huawei’s ARM-based desktop PC could leave you scratching your head.
...
First the ARM while speedy in a iPhone or iPad Pro when running MacOS 11 might not be that efficient as a desktop when you push it.

Interesting, so you’re saying Huawei has written their own desktop OS and designed and built their own custom ARM-based chips to run it on, and they didn’t get very good performance? I wasn’t aware of that. Do you have an more info on this?

Every time I see someone say, “oh, sure, ARM is fast enough for a phone, but not for a desktop”, I’m always a bit astonished. Apple has built the absolute fastest, highest performance phone chips on the planet, designed specifically to run in the extremely limited mobile environment - hiding behind the screen in a 1/4” thick machine with no airflow, no active cooling, and quite limited battery capacity. And they’ve invested huge amounts of time and money in developing a world class processor design team. Do you really think they’ll just take whatever their current phone chip is and drop it in a laptop or desktop system?

I fully expect that, several years ago, they told the chip design team, “these new A-series chips are fantastic - now, we’ve got a side project for you - we want you to design us two new chips: one for a system with more room, active cooling, and 5x the battery capacity available, and the other for a system with much more cooling capacity and unlimited 3.3V/5V DC available and no batteries (both with tons more RAM). Now, just how much CPU can you build for us in those two scenarios?” And I expect we’ll see the first answers to those challenges in the fall.

You’re making the mistake of comparing specific chips optimized to run in phones with chips optimized to run in desktop systems, and assuming that’s a fair comparison and representative of what Apple will ship. You haven’t yet seen what an ARM chip designed for laptop/desktop use is capable of. The Intel/AMD x86_64 instruction set doesn’t have any inherent advantages over the ARM instruction set. But ARM chips tend to have much higher performance per watt (this is why you don’t see phones running x86 chips, no matter how much Intel would like that). The latest iPhone/iPad chips beat a lot of laptop systems on performance already, and the chips they’ve designed for laptop/desktop use are going to be even faster.

 

[dave255]

Interesting, so you’re saying Huawei has written their own desktop OS and designed and built their own custom ARM-based chips to run it on, and they didn’t get very good performance? I wasn’t aware of that. Do you have an more info on this?

Every time I see someone say, “oh, sure, ARM is fast enough for a phone, but not for a desktop”, I’m always a bit astonished. Apple has built the absolute fastest, highest performance phone chips on the planet, designed specifically to run in the extremely limited mobile environment - hiding behind the screen in a 1/4” thick machine with no airflow, no active cooling, and quite limited battery capacity. And they’ve invested huge amounts of time and money in developing a world class processor design team. Do you really think they’ll just take whatever their current phone chip is and drop it in a laptop or desktop system?

I fully expect that, several years ago, they told the chip design team, “these new A-series chips are fantastic - now, we’ve got a side project for you - we want you to design us two new chips: one for a system with more room, active cooling, and 5x the battery capacity available, and the other for a system with much more cooling capacity and unlimited 3.3V/5V DC available and no batteries (both with tons more RAM). Now, just how much CPU can you build for us in those two scenarios?” And I expect we’ll see the first answers to those challenges in the fall.

You’re making the mistake of comparing specific chips optimized to run in phones with chips optimized to run in desktop systems, and assuming that’s a fair comparison and representative of what Apple will ship. You haven’t yet seen what an ARM chip designed for laptop/desktop use is capable of. The Intel/AMD x86_64 instruction set doesn’t have any inherent advantages over the ARM instruction set. But ARM chips tend to have much higher performance per watt (this is why you don’t see phones running x86 chips, no matter how much Intel would like that). The latest iPhone/iPad chips beat a lot of laptop systems on performance already, and the chips they’ve designed for laptop/desktop use are going to be even faster.

If you are from the UK and of certain age you may remember we had Arm desktops at school way back in 1987 in the form of the Acorn_Archimedes and they ran much faster and smoother compared to the intel pc's so i'm sure Apples desktop chips will be pretty amazing!

 

[Dave245]

If you are from the UK and of certain age you may remember we had Arm desktops at school way back in 1987 in the form of the Acorn_Archimedes and they ran much faster and smoother compared to the intel pc's so i'm sure Apples desktop chips will be pretty amazing!

I'm from the U.K but I was born in 1986, my first computer experience was with a terrible Windows machine at primary school , it seriously took so long to load up.

I didn't start using a Mac until University in 2011, my MacBook Pro 2011 was the first Mac I ever owned and I loved that machine, along side my iMac (I brought for home in 2012) they were by far the best computers I had ever used. Now I'm using a 2019 13" MacBook Pro and yes I really like it, however I keep expecting to have the keyboard issue at some point.

As for ARM, Apple's chipset team are killing it, the iPad Pro has benchmark speeds that makes some laptops laughable. I'm really excited to see what Apple produce with ARM. However if they release an Intel based iMac redesign before hand, I will buy that, mainly because my 2012 iMac is showing it's age and I really need to replace it at some point before it breaks down on me.

 

[dannys1]

Well, I think they will discontinue the iMac Pro. I guess the plan with iMac Pro was to develop better cooling technology for the iMac and to somehow fill the gap between old Mac Pro (trashcan) and current Mac Pro for the pro users. I don't think the will ever release an updated iMac Pro.

You could be right there - however it still fills that gap. The current iMac Pro is more in the realm of the old Mac Pro's entry and mid-specs, and the new Mac Pro is much higher end. I wouldn't be surprised if they discontinued it either though. I suspect it's going to be a while before we see Apple Silicon working with 256gb of ECC RAM and having 18 cores competing with Xeons - I don't think the first batch of Apple Silicon is even going to have discrete graphics.

 

[PaulpBenitti]

Can we please get a 5K Thunderbolt Display that does not cost $6K?

I would also like an ultra wide retina display. It makes much more sense than sticking two 4k monitors side by side. This should cost no more than $2k.

 

[JMacHack]

Except that he (she?) is actually quite reliable. Apparently he starts tweets with "in my dream" because of Chinese law. If you "dream" it, it's not a leak, so he can't be criminally charged or sued over leaked info. I'm not sure if that's true, but it makes sense. Each of his tweets opens with "in my dream" and his track record is pretty impressive.

Oh, I didn't know about that. That's kinda clever even if it got lost in translation.

Still, I think we're leaping to conclusions about this leak being an iMac specifically.

 

[Jacobi]

My wish list for the ARM release cycle:

- redesigned iMac with a new keyboard/mouse/trackpad set, trackpad compatible with Apple Pencil
- redesigned MBP 14" with a much improved webcam, thermals, and trackpad compatible with Apple Pencil
- new set of standalone Apple Thunderbolt displays that are in a "normal" price range

I can dream, right?

 

[Woochifer]

In for a refreshed Apple TV, AirPods and AirTags.

Need to update my 2009 27” iMac, but buying last gen intel, or even first gen ARM sounds like a bad idea.

Yep, we're finally replacing a 2006 20" iMac. The hardware works fine, but we can't update any of the software anymore, and even the music server functionality from iTunes got borked by Apple last year.

Our iMac is the 2nd gen Intel model, which came out less than 10 months after the 1st gen Intel model debuted and shared the polycarbonate body that Apple used for the PowerPC-based iMac G5. The Core Duo-based 1st gen Intel iMac was limited to 32-bit software, and quickly replaced by the 64-bit Core 2 Duo processors. Same thing applied to the 1st gen Macbooks as well, which Apple sold for less than 6 months before replacing it with a Core 2 Duo-based model.

The 1st gen Intel iMac had a shorter shelf life than other iMacs that followed. That model and the 1st gen Macbook seemed more like a transitional products.

And it wouldn't surprise me if the first ARM-based Macs were similarly replaced by more refined versions not long after they debut.

 

[n-evo]

It seems absurd to me that Apple would unveil a new industrial design for the Intel-based iMac. They would almost certainly reserve the new design for the first Apple Silicon-based machine.

After the PPC>Intel announcement back in 2005 Apple released the iMac with iSight. It was a new iMac design that still carried a PPC processor. The same design lived on to become the first Intel iMac. So they did it before...

 

[Woochifer]

I’ve echoed this thinking as well.
But then it struck me the other day that perhaps the pandemic has slowed production so much that content pegged to appear on Apple TV+, didn’t make it.
So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense promoting a new Apple TV set top box(with hopefully new remote), with little new content. It might be why Apple has delayed this launch.

I doubt that content would dictate Apple's timing for updating AppleTV (which is overdue for a refresh). For basic video functionality, AppleTV is not lacking in any way, given that it supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision. Any update to AppleTV would likely expand the unit's Arcade functionality, update the remote, and port other features over from iOS 14.

AppleTV uses the A10X processor that debuted in 2017. While that seems long in the tooth, keep in mind that the current base model iPad uses the similar A10 processor. So, that baseline very clearly remains a current developer target, and will likely remain current for a while.

 

[IlluminatedSage]

We are due at my place for 2 new iMac's or an iMac pro. sucks apple is so slow with updates. habitually skipping what would be obvious chips other companies offer. would love to wait it out for a ARM Mac. but can't wait for now.

 

[Smearbrick]

I don’t get it, why would you want a last gen intel Mac when all the software and everything is switching to arm based cpu. Why would you not wait and buy the arm based iMac. dont understand...

I’m one of the few who aren’t thrilled about eh ARM transition. Just an opinion. Quite frankly, because of all the baseless and rampant speculation regarding ARM and Apple (with regard to which machines they producing and timelines - people are just making crap up at this point) I’m pretty much tired of hearing about it.

 

[kilihn]

I’m one of the few who aren’t thrilled about eh ARM transition. Just an opinion. Quite frankly, because of all the baseless and rampant speculation regarding ARM and Apple (with regard to which machines they producing and timelines - people are just making crap up at this point) I’m pretty much tired of hearing about it.

Yeah I feel also people are disregarding the fact we are in a pandemic (also US in a weird state with China) and do not know what the next year is gonna look like as far as production/distribution of these ARM Mac's. I think there will almost definitely be further disruption in the release schedule.