Apple rumored to debut new Mac mini in October alongside iPad refresh
A report on Thursday cites inside sources as saying Apple is preparing to launch a new Mac mini in the near future, possibly as soon as October to coincide with the usual iPad refresh cycle.
Apple's headless Mac mini desktop has been left untouched for nearly two years, but the company may be priming a refresh that could debut next month, reports MacRumors.
While fans of the pint-sized desktop have been waiting for a long overdue refresh, Apple has pushed out numerous iterations of other products in its lineup, including the redesigned Mac Pro.
In spite of having a much lower Mac marketshare compared to the iMac and MacBook lineup, there has been no shortage of Mac mini rumors since the machine received its minor spec bump in 2012. For example, at the tail end of that year, reports claimed Apple would move production of the tiny desktop to the U.S.
More recently, rumors in July pointed to a Support Pages document regarding Boot Camp that referenced a "mid-2014" Mac mini, though with summer come and gone, it seems likely that post was made in error. At the time, Apple had just released the MacBook Pro with Retina display, leading some to believe the update was meant for those machines instead.
The veracity of today's rumor is murky, as the Apple blog recently whiffed on claims that the iPhone 6 would launch on Oct. 14 as part of a "busy month." Apple's latest iPhone was announced on Sept. 9 and saw wide release last week.
Apple's headless Mac mini desktop has been left untouched for nearly two years, but the company may be priming a refresh that could debut next month, reports MacRumors.
While fans of the pint-sized desktop have been waiting for a long overdue refresh, Apple has pushed out numerous iterations of other products in its lineup, including the redesigned Mac Pro.
In spite of having a much lower Mac marketshare compared to the iMac and MacBook lineup, there has been no shortage of Mac mini rumors since the machine received its minor spec bump in 2012. For example, at the tail end of that year, reports claimed Apple would move production of the tiny desktop to the U.S.
More recently, rumors in July pointed to a Support Pages document regarding Boot Camp that referenced a "mid-2014" Mac mini, though with summer come and gone, it seems likely that post was made in error. At the time, Apple had just released the MacBook Pro with Retina display, leading some to believe the update was meant for those machines instead.
The veracity of today's rumor is murky, as the Apple blog recently whiffed on claims that the iPhone 6 would launch on Oct. 14 as part of a "busy month." Apple's latest iPhone was announced on Sept. 9 and saw wide release last week.
Comments
It's about time!
Someone a few months back said that they had heard the old (current) mini would be better for some things than the new one. I'm thinking new enclosure. That or a Haswell ULT chip from the MBA, like the cheapo iMac.
I suppose they could have gotten enough Core M Broadwell chips, but I have no real idea.
I thought the Bash flaw affected all the latest versions of Mac OS X, too.
If a redesign is indeed in the offing, I'd love to see what kind of trickle-down might occur from the designs of the Airport Extreme series, and of course the Mac Pro.
Off topic but It does from what I read on Ars but if you read what he said he is not meaning that the way you took it, he needs it fixed on older due to hardware constraints he has.
But about 10.9 and 10.10, I'm not too concerned (I did switch my Mac mini's 10.10 web server off for now), I'm sure OS X will get patched ASAP and it isn't something that will trouble the average user. It is however a major concern for Linux servers and that is not a trivial number!
* Larger, with more rugged full-sized rather than laptop drives would be great. There's lots of room under my desk. It doesn't need to be small.
* So would the same set of new ports that Apple is likely to be adding to their laptops in 2015. Without that, it will soon be outdated. And lots of ports. You almost can't have too many of them.
* I'm so spoiled by having mine drive two large displays, have the ability to drive three, perhaps though those new ports, would be a plus.
* Best of all would be to make it easy for users to create their own hard/flash drive combinations from third parties. It'd be great to buy with the hard drive and later add a flash drive from OWC.
I have the latest Mac mini and it is cute but so very slow compared to even my 2010 MBP let alone my nMac Pro, which I know is totally unfair to mention in the same sentence. Is yours using SSD? Perhaps that would help mine.
I have the latest Mac mini and it is cute but so very slow compared to even my 2010 MBP let alone my nMac Pro, which I know is totally unfair to mention in the same sentence. Is yours using SSD? Perhaps that would help mine.
YES
It's been about 6 years since Anand Shimpi (of AnandTech) said that getting an SSD was the biggest upgrade available to the average user.
I'm still limping along with a 2006 MacBook. It would have been retired long ago, except that I upgraded it with an SSD (and put the original drive in a special, custom caddy).
You can get similar dual-drive mounting kits from OWC and other vendors.
Please! Especially if they don't fix the bash flaw in Lion and older. I don't have a Mac capable of running anything newer thanks to EFI constraints.
bash is a relatively independent non-OS X part of UN*X, and shouldn't require an OS X update, though it might come as part of one. In any case, someone will probably provide a tool and source for building your own fixed bash, which will be a single file which can be put on your Mac (usually in /bin/). Terminal should not need to be updated for this, though again Apple could enhance Terminal slightly to inform the user that the bash in use is vulnerable, should they wish to do so.
Here is a cookbook(s) for acquiring/building a new bash, from apple.stackexchange.com , a highly respected developers' site:
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/146849/how-do-i-recompile-bash-to-avoid-the-remote-exploit-cve-2014-6271-and-cve-2014-7
This page also has a (highly technical) discussion of the overall landscape for this vulnerability and its fixes.
I haven't got around to doing this yet, but the instructions look credible (not easy in some case, but credible; also, you'll need Xcode to recompile with the first procedure described, not a lightweight download. There are more "classic" UN*X ways to do it, not requiring Xcode; one such is described about 60% of the way down the page: "This is going to be beyond the ken…"). It's possible the recompile instructions would fail to build a patched bash if either the source tarball used or the patch happen to be incompatible with your older OS X version (this difficulty is pretty well confirmed near the bottom of the page).
Best is to keep your eyes open for a compatible patched version from a reputable source (e.g. MacUpdate)
Update: looks like /bin/sh (the predecessor to pretty well all shells in use today, including bash) is also vulnerable; probably doesn't make it appreciably more difficult to fix this mess.
So you're probably in only a slightly worse position than users with brand-new systems, and you'll ultimately be able to get a fix, I'm sure.
Apologies: my post on bash fixes was somehow made to the wrong forum.
Quote:
It doesn't need to be small.
Yes, the Mac Mini needs to be small.
So were gonna see a Quad-Core Xeon based Mac mini with up to 64GB of RAM, and NVIDIA 980 graphics right?
Quote:
Yes, the Mac Mini needs to be small.
Depends what you mean by "small". Its current size is okay but yes it could be slightly smaller. Would be nice to see at least Iris Pro graphics on it, but I doubt it.
It wouldn't be a shock at all. For some uses that the Mini is put to, an "A" series chip would be ideal. That isn't to say every user would be happy but Apple doesn't need to make every user happy. The big deal here would be a far cheaper Mini like platform that would deliver similar performance.
The BASH flaw isn't a problem unless you do a lot of network facing stuff via a web server or SSH. This particular bug has been blow way out of proportion to the way it could potentially impact Mac users.