nathany

Wouldn't next year's MacBook Pros ship with Kaby Lake based on Q1 availability from Intel? The rumours point to Coffee Lake on the high-end, including six core CPUs. But I wouldn't expect those until 2018.

If it's true that Kaby Lake doesn't require an Alpine Ridge controller for Thunderbolt 3, that's very interesting for a 12" MacBook update and possibly the MacBook Air -- which could happen any day now.

As for the wildly anticipated MacBook Pro, just upgrading them to Skylake this year is a nice improvement, especially the 15" which is still rocking Haswell. There should be ample space for Alpine Ridge to still have Thunderbolt 3. Other than a slight ~10% boost, Kaby Lake's main improvements are in the fixed-function encode/decode hardware on the GPU. Not a big loss if there is an AMD Polaris GPU onboard with the same functionality.

The slow trickle of Intel CPUs certainly complicates matters for Apple's engineers, but I'm confident in their abilities to bring out a great new Mac lineup.

Pretty impressive, especially since the iPad is passively cooled and must have a way lower wattage than the 45W Intel chip in the 15" MacBook Pro. That should enable tapered Air-like designs with Pro level performance within a few years. With the "Marzipan" project bringing iOS apps to Mac, and with apps like Photoshop going to the iPad, it seems like only a matter of time before developers will need to recompile all their Mac apps for ARM-based laptops. Or will we see the return of Rosetta to smooth out the transition? Exciting times!