Apple has every reason to stagger the release of the next gen iMac. With AMD Navi GPUs and next gen Intel Xeon Ws with no release date officially in sight, they cannot have an iMac non-Pro get released before the next iMac Pro, especially if the new non-Pro outperforms the the base tier Pro. Perhaps this is why Apple is transitioning to Arm processors in filuture models, to avoid future staggered releases by not binding themselves to Intel/AMD's schedule.
The more I come to this site the more articles I see that are b*tch, b*tch, b*tch about anything or articles filled with half-truths purposely skewed to favor another company and/or to make people think Apple users are missing out on something Android users enjoying.
Examples...
Epic doesn’t intend to sell to anyone, but after Jim Cramer suggests Apple buy the company, an article is written using a selected part of the Epic CEO’s words to make it look like Apple was spurned by a buyout offer.
5G support of a modem that won’t be released until late 2019, has no infrastructure support from telephone carriers, resembles previous nightmarish communications upgrades is written to portray Apple as a laggard while others will provide experiences to be envious of.
New hardware rumored by a “reliable” analyst gets reported then shortly afterwards a hit piece on current hardware is written/published.
If you think Apple insider is hostile to Apple you may want to give the rest of the internet a miss.
Apple missed an opportunity to introduce a new design for the 20th anniversary last year. Although a great current design, i will surely be disappointed if it doesn’t change - at the very least trim those bezels! I will also call BS if the starting config has anything less than a 512GB SSD. The mini has a ridiculous 128GB.
That 6K3K Display is going to have 4-6x NGSFF card slots for storage, neural, graphics and processor cards. It’ll ship in silver or space gray. They’ll drop the “i” and name it “Mac”. Whether it’s just a Mac or Mac Pro will depend on the card configuration/performance.
its been disheartening to watch the snowball of studios and design firms throwing in the towel, cascading down to the freelance guys. Im half expecting Adobe and other developers to throw in the towel soon as well. Its already a joke how much faster and stable CC is on Windows. These are business’s that are gone forever.
From my experience, if it wasn’t for Keynote, a massive swath of the Dental, Medical and educational industries would be gone in a heartbeat. All the practice management software and internal operations are windows and linux, and they keep a MacBook around for their presentations. This is a large lucrative industry segment - and if you aren’t nervous that it’s hinging on 1 piece of software that relies on Microsoft’s ineptitude with PowerPoint...
If the new hardware comes in at Fortune 100 price points - doesn’t matter how cool or thin it is... the stampede to Windows will be epic.
I've got a 2012 iMac which is still pretty nippy, though it is quite long in the tooth, and the Fusion drive is really getting quite old now. And of course a pre-emptive replacement requires quite literally surgically removing the display with a pizza slice and removing most of the components to get to the drive.
People saying that Intel's not updated their CPUs are right, but there are other components in the computer too. The GPUs in the current iMacs are pretty poor, especially driving a 5K display. GPU speeds are still following Moore's Law, even if Intel CPUs aren't. The iMac still uses an actual spinning hard drive along with a small SSD, and just 8GB RAM even in the best config - utter madness in a machine that's £2,200. Incredibly, the 24" models still use a 5400RPM drive too! I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't find a single prosumer focussed PC for more than £1500 that still has a HDD as its main drive. The £1200 27" Dell AIO has a 128GB SSD +1TB HDD and 8th gen i5, the £1600 one has a 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 16GB RAM at a faster clock rate, an 8th gen i7 and a Nvidia GTX1050, which blows the crappy Radeon Pro 560 out the water. Granted the Dell has a 4K display, but even so you get all that for £600 less than the iMac. The crappy GPU may well have something to do with Apple's childish spat with Nvidia, they really have a habit of falling out with GPU manufacturers.
Besides all that, people rightly balk at paying the introductory price for a machine 2 years down the line. Though with Apple's current pricing strategy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the new iMacs are 20% more expensive.
It really does seem Cook splits 90% of his attention to the iPhone and iPad, and the Mac is lumped into the other stuff category that he could care less about. Just because he's apparently able to do all the work he needs to do on an iPad, doesn't mean the rest of the world can. He really needs to pull his finger out, or leave the job to someone who can.
It is time for Apple to offer yearly product updates. this is absurd at this point.
And for what reason? So you want Apple to release a new iMac or MacBook Pro with a 100-200 MHz update in CPU speed just for the sake of updating the iMac? It's pretty worthless to update the a computer for the sake of updating it. Apple tried this before and people were just as pissed off. The last few Intel CPU's that Apple can use on a lot of their products leave little to no improvement in speed, definitely nothing a general everyday consumer will see.
Updates to hardware and software are released when they're ready. When you rush products out the door like others do, you don't really gain much in the end.
All Apple products are going with thinner bezels, so I think the iMac is due for the same treatment. But rather than make the unit slightly smaller, I would love to have it expand to a 6k display that is 30 inches (or so). The iMac is due for a face lift (even if only slightly), and I hope that is what Apple has in store for us. I am holding off updating my desktop to when the new unit comes out.
As far as portability, that's what my iPhone and iPad are for. I want a larger screen for my desk, and will (probably have to) pay for that upgrade. I don't want to have multiple screens.
I hope that's not the reason. Who cares about "bezels" on a desktop device? One could argue that wide bezels are a feature on the iMac--reducing distraction between the screen and whatever random thing happens to be behind it
The wait is not for no good reason. The company is in a hot mess right now, leaderless and drifting out to sea. Tim Cook has to go yesterday. His lack of vision and holding people accountable for timelines has finally caught up to him. The company just isn't as good as it was a few years ago, and as it should be. I realize that iPhones the bulk of the profits, but there will be no profits in the future if they don't get innovation AND execution right soon.
You forgot the /s
But pretty good beginner effort in mimicking anti-Apple, anti-Cook trolls. Next time remember to mention Steve Jobs and how long you've been a HUGE Apple/Mac fan.
Surely they wouldn't just put another 580 in there would they? You're going to pay 2000 dollars for a computer that gets nuked by a GTX 2060 or 1660 Ti? A 2000 dollar computer with an almost 3 year old midrange graphics card? Only an abject fool does that. They don't use NVidia. So that eliminates the 1070, 1070 Ti, 1080, 2060, 1060Ti, 2070 and 2080.
AMD only has FOUR graphics cards faster than the 580: The 590, which is only 8% faster with the newest drivers. And It has 20% more TDP no less. Then you have the Vega 56 (iMac Pro), 64 (iMac Pro) and the VII, which is faster than any of the aforementioned and is an 800 dollar card.
There simply isn't a GPU available for Apple to use in its TWO year upgrade on the iMac and using a THREE year old MIDRANGE GPU in a premium 2000 dollar computer is absolutely unacceptable.
That leaves us...and Apple waiting for AMD and the Polaris 11 based 3080 which uses about the same wattage as a 580 but has 1070 Ti- 1080 performance.
Im half expecting Adobe and other developers to throw in the towel soon as well. Its already a joke how much faster and stable CC is on Windows.
I fully blame Adobe for that. I mean, I don't think it's Apple's fault that simply dragging a rectangle with a drop shadow in Illustrator causes beachballs. Adobe's been terrible for a lonnnnnnng time.
Surely they wouldn't just put another 580 in there would they? You're going to pay 2000 dollars for a computer that gets nuked by a GTX 2060 or 1660 Ti? A 2000 dollar computer with an almost 3 year old midrange graphics card? Only an abject fool does that. They don't use NVidia. So that eliminates the 1070, 1070 Ti, 1080, 2060, 1060Ti, 2070 and 2080.
AMD only has FOUR graphics cards faster than the 580: The 590, which is only 8% faster with the newest drivers. And It has 20% more TDP no less. Then you have the Vega 56 (iMac Pro), 64 (iMac Pro) and the VII, which is faster than any of the aforementioned and is an 800 dollar card.
There simply isn't a GPU available for Apple to use in its TWO year upgrade on the iMac and using a THREE year old MIDRANGE GPU in a premium 2000 dollar computer is absolutely unacceptable.
That leaves us...and Apple waiting for AMD and the Polaris 11 based 3080 which uses about the same wattage as a 580 but has 1070 Ti- 1080 performance.
Surely they wouldn't just put another 580 in there would they? You're going to pay 2000 dollars for a computer that gets nuked by a GTX 2060 or 1660 Ti? A 2000 dollar computer with an almost 3 year old midrange graphics card? Only an abject fool does that. They don't use NVidia. So that eliminates the 1070, 1070 Ti, 1080, 2060, 1060Ti, 2070 and 2080.
AMD only has FOUR graphics cards faster than the 580: The 590, which is only 8% faster with the newest drivers. And It has 20% more TDP no less. Then you have the Vega 56 (iMac Pro), 64 (iMac Pro) and the VII, which is faster than any of the aforementioned and is an 800 dollar card.
There simply isn't a GPU available for Apple to use in its TWO year upgrade on the iMac and using a THREE year old MIDRANGE GPU in a premium 2000 dollar computer is absolutely unacceptable.
That leaves us...and Apple waiting for AMD and the Polaris 11 based 3080 which uses about the same wattage as a 580 but has 1070 Ti- 1080 performance.
That is what we're waiting for.
What about the Vega 16/20 in the MBP?
580/56/64 are all faster than the 16/20.
Ah, thanks — I was thinking of the 560 that was in the MBP. I forgot what was in the current iMacs, I've only had to order one for my office so far and already forgot what the options were.
While I share your general frustrations about Apple possibly neglecting Mac hardware updates as a whole, I think the iMac is one of the least problematic lines. New 8th or 9th-gen Intel CPUs would bring improvements in multi-core performance (~+49% for i7-9700K vs 7700K), but as usual not much in single-core (~+6%).
I feel pretty confident that the reasons for delay is the lack of GPU updates from AMD. If Apple would release a new iMac now it would still have to use the same GPU, and that would not look very good. (Radeon VII is not an option, considering both the heat generation and cost.)
I don't see any possible iMac updates until the launch of AMD Navi GPUs sometime around July.
They could possibly consider getting back to supporting Nvidia GPUs as well, but from the AppleInsider editorial some month ago that does unfortunately not seem likely.
Frankly, I'm increasingly pessimistic about trusting Apple to provide updated Macs on a regular basis, so I built a Xeon workstation and now use Windows and Resolve for video and Lightroom for photo editing.
I'm more concerned about the Mac Pro (End of 2019? Really?) and with the mini and laptops having more and more components soldered and made non-upgradable and non-serviceable even by Apple's own technicians. In addition to protecting profitability there is an obsession with shaving that last 1 mm from already thin laptops. Making the Pro laptops one or two mm thicker would improve both ergonomics (keyboard), upgradability (SO-DIMM and m.2 SSD), battery capacity as well as cooling (which in turn improves both acoustics and performance).
If the delay is due to a significant redesign, then it’s justified. If there are only incremental hardware improvements or cosmetic refinements, then delays are indefensible.
i remember when Apple updated its machines four times a year. Yeah, that was back in the early/mid ‘90’s. It dropped to once a year. That was still fine. But Apple’s irregularity is hurting sales, and not in a small way.
This has been the worst time to be a desktop Mac user in a long time. The delay in the MacPro at this point is simply inexcusable. If Apple doesn't want to make these low volume "edge case" machines then license it out to hardware manufacturers that will be more than willing to fill the gaps. They can put terms around the licensing to prevent them from being undercut on the low end like during the PowerPC clone era.
We need hardware diversity on the Mac; if that's not important enough for Apple to be bothered to do then turn stewardship over to a companies or companies who will cater to the needs of their users.
OTOH hand I was using my mom's 5K iMac last week - that display is simply gorgeous.
In general, I get what Apple is doing. I have some people there for some time. But even they are a bit confused at this point.
apple sometimes has too much of the “iconic product” syndrome. They can’t seem to just make a product that works. They have to make something that no one else is making. It seems as though if it isn’t museum quality, it’s not Apple. To a certain extent, they’ve always had this problem.
Jridder asks WHAT needs changed: the 21" iMac needs to ditch the 2.5" 5400rpm spinner. Completely. Fusion drives in the age of USB Type-C are toast tech. They were toast tech 5 years ago (coincidentally, when Apple moved to SSD in the portables exclusively). The cost of an 21" iMac BTO'd with an SSD is insane, nearly the cost of an entry 27" with 3.5" Fusion drive.
Also, IF they keep the Fusion Drives, the 32GB SSD component needs to go back to 128GB. 24GB was just beyond moronic… 32GB isn't that much better. And considering how long it took Apple to support Fusion Drives with APFS, anything less than 128GB would be asinine. (So the user can "break" the Fusion Drive within the next 5 years of ownership--current models are 18 months old already, so longer Mac lives, right?--to make the machine work when Apple decides to surreptitiously drop support for Fusion.)
I don't care WHAT Apple does with the iMac past killing the hard drive for SSD. I'd -like- to see them hold on pricing, but--who am I kidding?--not gonna happen with this profit-at-all-costs-driven Apple Exec team.
Apple has every reason to stagger the release of the next gen iMac. With AMD Navi GPUs and next gen Intel Xeon Ws with no release date officially in sight, they cannot have an iMac non-Pro get released before the next iMac Pro, especially if the new non-Pro outperforms the the base tier Pro. Perhaps this is why Apple is transitioning to Arm processors in filuture models, to avoid future staggered releases by not binding themselves to Intel/AMD's schedule.
I speculated on this reason too, they are waiting to synchronize iMac and iMac Pro release times, or, that they are waiting on some part or component; or, their rumored reasons of only shipping updated products that make a sizable improvement of existing products, but their “wait” times are too long. Stretching to 18 months is ok, but stretching to 24 months or two years? That’s not good for customers who want to buy in the latter 3rd of the product cycle.
If new iMacs are coming in say June of 2019, it would mean the 2017 iMac cycle is 2 years old by then. It would be better for customers if they updated to Coffee Lake + T2 in September 2018, and have a short 8 month cycle then stretching a 2017 product for 2 years. They could have updated the iMac 27 to 6-core Coffee Lake and T2 coprocessors in the Summer of 2017 and upping GPU speed grades a little, and it would have been great. Customers would come away feeling they got good value out of their money.
I’m running out of time on a much needed upgrade to my 2013 iMac. If nothing materializes in the next 3-4 months- I’ll be forced to look at 2 options. Shifting to a souped-up 2018 mini, or, *cringe* looking at a windows10 machine.
im almost afraid to start pricing what 3-4K buys me with wintel now...
Comments
(/wishing)
Im half expecting Adobe and other developers to throw in the towel soon as well.
Its already a joke how much faster and stable CC is on Windows.
These are business’s that are gone forever.
From my experience, if it wasn’t for Keynote, a massive swath of the Dental, Medical and educational industries would be gone in a heartbeat. All the practice management software and internal operations are windows and linux, and they keep a MacBook around for their presentations.
This is a large lucrative industry segment - and if you aren’t nervous that it’s hinging on 1 piece of software that relies on Microsoft’s ineptitude with PowerPoint...
If the new hardware comes in at Fortune 100 price points - doesn’t matter how cool or thin it is... the stampede to Windows will be epic.
People saying that Intel's not updated their CPUs are right, but there are other components in the computer too. The GPUs in the current iMacs are pretty poor, especially driving a 5K display. GPU speeds are still following Moore's Law, even if Intel CPUs aren't. The iMac still uses an actual spinning hard drive along with a small SSD, and just 8GB RAM even in the best config - utter madness in a machine that's £2,200. Incredibly, the 24" models still use a 5400RPM drive too! I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't find a single prosumer focussed PC for more than £1500 that still has a HDD as its main drive. The £1200 27" Dell AIO has a 128GB SSD +1TB HDD and 8th gen i5, the £1600 one has a 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 16GB RAM at a faster clock rate, an 8th gen i7 and a Nvidia GTX1050, which blows the crappy Radeon Pro 560 out the water. Granted the Dell has a 4K display, but even so you get all that for £600 less than the iMac. The crappy GPU may well have something to do with Apple's childish spat with Nvidia, they really have a habit of falling out with GPU manufacturers.
Besides all that, people rightly balk at paying the introductory price for a machine 2 years down the line. Though with Apple's current pricing strategy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the new iMacs are 20% more expensive.
It really does seem Cook splits 90% of his attention to the iPhone and iPad, and the Mac is lumped into the other stuff category that he could care less about. Just because he's apparently able to do all the work he needs to do on an iPad, doesn't mean the rest of the world can. He really needs to pull his finger out, or leave the job to someone who can.
Updates to hardware and software are released when they're ready. When you rush products out the door like others do, you don't really gain much in the end.
You forgot the /s
But pretty good beginner effort in mimicking anti-Apple, anti-Cook trolls. Next time remember to mention Steve Jobs and how long you've been a HUGE Apple/Mac fan.
I'm more concerned about the Mac Pro (End of 2019? Really?) and with the mini and laptops having more and more components soldered and made non-upgradable and non-serviceable even by Apple's own technicians. In addition to protecting profitability there is an obsession with shaving that last 1 mm from already thin laptops. Making the Pro laptops one or two mm thicker would improve both ergonomics (keyboard), upgradability (SO-DIMM and m.2 SSD), battery capacity as well as cooling (which in turn improves both acoustics and performance).
In general, I get what Apple is doing. I have some people there for some time. But even they are a bit confused at this point.
apple sometimes has too much of the “iconic product” syndrome. They can’t seem to just make a product that works. They have to make something that no one else is making. It seems as though if it isn’t museum quality, it’s not Apple. To a certain extent, they’ve always had this problem.
If new iMacs are coming in say June of 2019, it would mean the 2017 iMac cycle is 2 years old by then. It would be better for customers if they updated to Coffee Lake + T2 in September 2018, and have a short 8 month cycle then stretching a 2017 product for 2 years. They could have updated the iMac 27 to 6-core Coffee Lake and T2 coprocessors in the Summer of 2017 and upping GPU speed grades a little, and it would have been great. Customers would come away feeling they got good value out of their money.
im almost afraid to start pricing what 3-4K buys me with wintel now...