stevedownunder

These are the type of stories we need...useful, informative & helpful.

More like this please.

I agree, time to stop giving people like Ming any credit for this type speculation, it's just a joke.

A better analogy is a professional dart player saying he can hit the bullseye blindfolded after being spun around a few times, then being given lots of credit for hitting the opposite wall with his dart.

Here's my prediction (I'm not a professional clairvoyant, just a developer & Apple user for the past 3 decades)

"Apple will release a new product this year, or maybe next year, or even before the end of the decade.
It'll be based on a HomePod and an iPad, or maybe not.
If it is, it'll have a screen made by a Chinese company and it'll be touch enabled and be able to show movies and play music and be able to play what you want it to do "just by talking to it"using Apple Intelligence, it may even control your lights, security system, heating system and window blinds. It'll have a couple of generations old A'nn' chip and it might be called the HomePad or something else.

I also predict new iPads that will look almost identical but that will be better than the last generation and have better battery life, and use new A'nn' series chips.
New Macs that will be better than the last generation, use newer M'nn' chips and have better battery life, but look remarkably similar to the last generation.
New Apple Watches which might, or might not, be slightly have slightly more rounded corners, they'll be a 1/2mm thinner and have better battery life and use brand a new A'nn' chipset.
There will also be the first of the Apple home robots coming in the next decade, these will have similar functionality to HomePad, but they'll have wheels or legs, or fly and will be able to follow you around but they won't be able to do the dishes or do the laundry, which is what we really want.

All of these I expect to use chips manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor, Broadcom and Samsung plus a few other Taiwanese & Chinese suppliers!
I expect most of the components to be manufactured in the USA, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, India, Indonesia and any other large country that is threatening to stop Apple selling products in that country"


I also predict none of us are using our existing products to their full potential, so let's have more articles that just concentrate on using the full capabilities of what we currently have  ....

Malcom, could you please do this comparison on the new M4 MBP (pro chip) v Intel 2019 MBP.

I normally upgrade every 5-6 years so would very much like a side by side comparison.

I have a fully loaded 2.4GHz Core i9 2019 15" 32GB, 1TB - speed is not a problem, apps load almost instantly but at some stage it'll stop getting updates since Apple will obsolete it within the next couple years even though the hardware is fine.

I'm a data architect/developer and work on remote VM's & have 1000Mb up and down fibre to the home, I don't need a day's battery life except when going to conferences otherwise I'm generally not far away from power. I don't do video editing, I'm a data guy and we run everything in the Cloud.I have my MBP hooked up to a 32" LG Ultrawide (5k x 2k) monitor which is fantastic. I use a keytronic keyboard, logi tech urge mouse and have the MBP hooked up to a OWC TB3 dock.

I'd like a new machine but it's a serious chunk of my own money to upgrade and the current one is still in perfect condition so the question I keep asking myself is "What is the Compelling reason for people like me to upgrade"? 

It's not Apple Intelligence yet, because I can use Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT at the moment and even Apple intelligence on my M1 iPad.

So very interested in a useful comparison.


Thank you.


Steve

One of my favourite shows on Apple

Fingers crossed for a new season soon.

I've read these comments and most pretty valid.

BUT

My Intel Mac 2019 i9 (upgrade in 2 years) needed to go in for a repair and was possibly going to be gone for a week. Could I live without it?

I'm a data engineer/developer so could my M1 iPad get me through a week.
There were a few things I couldn't do but iPad capabilities have come on leaps and bounds since I tried this several years earlier.

Stage Manager, a paired bluetooth keyboard and bluetooth mouse with an external 34" monitor worked very nicely (the usb-c/hdmi adaptor handy for this). Stage manager and Sidecar are really cool & I could remote into work using Citrix. If you use Office app, you can use Office 365 or the native iPad apps, Google apps mainly cloud anyway. You can do nearly everything with the various available Apps in the App store - someone clever has already solved most of your problems for a couple of dollars. I got through the week quite easily.

There are limitations yes, but it's getting close to fully usable day to day for me.
Being able to customise the screen, reduce icon size etc and better multitasking would be nice but I think this will eventually come. As for multitasking, if you're using a browser for office apps, emails etc - I question if this is a limitation but I understand everyone's needs are different,

After this week I have seriously thought whether to simply use a Raspberry PI and an iPad for replacing the Mac eventually.
I usually max out a Mac when I buy one then keep it for about 5 years so it's a big investment and I could just pay a $100 and get an updated Raspberry PI every year and give the old one to the local school. It's just not quite compelling enough yet but the seed in my mind has been planted.

I've been using Mac since the original Macintosh with 1 floppy !

I saw someone mention saving docs as encrypted dmg in a cloud drive - I never thought of that, brilliant idea.