The new Mini is my jam. The fact that it took so long to get a refresh still irks me something fierce, but better late than never, I guess?
Yeah it was a long time coming. I wonder if it was on the chopping block in the 2016/2017 timeframe before deciding to keep it around, but repositioning it away from the “switcher” target market.
Hopefully we’ll see an update next year—I expect a two year cadence like iMac/iMac Pro/MBA—but Intel. I think
@Zdigital2015 has been tracking the release schedule of the new 65W S-series but I can’t remember their projected release. Should see 8- and 10-core(?) if it’s on 10nm.
I agree 100%. I think both the Mac mini and the Mac Pro were on the chopping block at the C suite level to free up more manufacturing lines for iPhone and iPad, free up engineers, free up marketing, the whole enchilada (mmm, enchiladas...well, really, tacos...if you have Netflix, watch
Taco Chronicles, OMG, now I want tacos...anyways...). I suspect a few in the C-Suite disagreed strongly and argued that keeping them in stasis might be a hit on their rep, but the products would still be available for those who wanted to buy them. I honestly think that Apple has known, or has had a pretty good idea that the iPhone was reaching critical saturation and pursued a strategy to really differentiate (FaceID, A11 Bionic, dual-lens camera, full-screen OLED) as an excuse to push prices higher as they reached a critical inflection point. Given that inflection point, they pivoted in a fairly minor way to the Mac to shore up those two
woefully neglected models and markets.
The Mac Pro is a niche product with limited appeal regardless and so they built a niche machine and charge commensurately for it now.
The Mac mini is no longer considered a switcher machine, the iPhone or iPad is now the main focus of "switchers", Windows won, but Android hasn't, they are dead on the Tablet side and while they crap out phones like a baby eating strained peas and apricots, Google is as much a detriment as it is an asset to Android OS. Pixel isn't the product, you are.
So, the mini serves a really weird and diverse set of users, from rack servers to devs, to video production, to on the road, to HTPC, and anything in-between. The upmarket release ticked a lot of people off, but those were the people who will only ever buy the bottom of the line at the cheapest possible price and upgrade themselves, because macOS still beats Windows in just doing your daily jam, no matter how much the "Windows is just as good crowd" lectures us that we are sheep out of one side of their mouths while decrying Apple's unwillingness to make a cheap three PCIe slot mini tower when Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo produce multiple lines of these, but they don't run macOS, but I digress.
Intel still has a couple of Generations of CPUs at 14nm+++###$$$wootwoot waiting in the wings for us while they struggle to ship Ice Lake in volume to PC OEMs in time to stuff the holiday retail channel with 10nm U-Series laptops. They did the same thing with the 8th Gen (Core i5-8250U and i5-8350U, to the rescue, Dell, HP, et al), which prompted a decent upgrade cycle because now a $799 laptop had four cores instead of two, which was not insignificant.
So, anyways, Apple is lengthening their upgrade cycles, and moving SKUs a bit higher in price, most likely make room at the bottom and lower middle tiers for ARM-based Macs, which I think is going to be a longer transition than the PowerPC to Intel one, at least for the consumer segment. Apple knows that colder turkey, like the G5 to Mac Pro, two and done on the macOS front is probably not going to fly well because the Mac user base is HUGE compared to 2005 when PowerBook G5 was the original Internet meme.
Given that, I don't see the mini getting upgraded this year as the 8th Gen CPUs in use also permeate the recently upgraded 2019 iMac, and while beefier and coreier, don't up the brawn level until Apple has to decide if they want 8c/8t or 8c/16t in a
Mac mini. Those CPUs, while fairly new, still have UHD "Throw it in there, cause we just don't care" 630 Graphics onboard. If Apple can wait for 10th Gen S-Series, drop dGPUs and charge the same price (21.5" models), they will, they've done it before.
So that does leave a gap and question mark in the lineup given that S-Series desktop CPUs at 10nm (Promises, Promises Lake) aren't on tap until late 2020 or 2021, depending on which "leaked" fake roadmap you see on Wccftech, Tom's Hardware, et al. Right now, I'm of the mind that if you can wait until the second week of November to see if Apple refreshes the mini, sure, wait. If not, buy the Core i7 model and jam it full of cheap DDR4 before the memory cabal figures out how to get around those pesky collusion accusations, cuts production and we're all back to paying $200 for 2-8GB DIMMs. The DDR5 excuse will be cited and quoted like a bad prom picture, mark my words.
Bottom line, I think an update of the mini this year is unlikely.
PS-Intel has published their first SKUs for 10th Gen in the ARK, which now sports Iris GPUs. These are the aforementioned 15w U-Series models only that would be perfectly at home in the 13" MacBook Pro...yay, progress...oh, wait, Apple just refreshed the 13" MBP...sigh. Of course, they aren't in the wild yet and better for Dell to test them on their customers and Apple to observe success or failure from a relatively safe vantage point. Everyone look at the camera and say,
"Broadwell!"
Source:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...10th-generation-intel-core-i7-processors.html
Stay sane!
