snow66

These benchmarks give hints as to Apples strategy. Apple is using their revenue from phone sales to heavily invest in Chip design. This investment is paying off in an increasing gap in performance between Apples A series and competing ARM processors as well as a narrowing gap between Apples A series and conventional desktop CPUs. The question is why would Apple spend their time and money to push the envelope? Current smart phones are all fast enough, when why do we need faster chips? We probably don't for today's smart phone feature set. However, Apple may have plans to implement features not currently available on smart phones. If Apple chips are far ahead of everyone else, these new features couldn't be quickly copied. Another opportunity is outside the smart phone/tablet world. Apple would be able to differentiate their laptops, and desktops from everyone else's if they offer similar performance to Intel/AMD CPUs. They would have a CPU price advantage, be able to implement the features they want and set their own timetables. No longer a question of if, it is a question of when Apple uses their own Chips in their laptop and desktop lineup.

Apple certainly lost their focus on the mac line, letting the Pro and mac mini go way too long between updates.  Now I wonder if they are trying to be too ambitious with their redesign?  Apple put themselves in a corner in that after all this time they feel they can't just get by with a simple hardware refresh, but on the other hand a significant redesign takes time.  It appears that they have decided that they are going to wait until they have something significant and new they can be proud of.

Personally I have been waiting for a mac mini refresh for well over a year now.  My son has a lower end 2014 that he is now primarily using for video editing.  This isn't for work so he doesn't want to spend significant money, but the iMac is way under powered for what he is using it for.  He's happy and familiar with his editing tools and is invested in the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone and Ipad Pro so a refreshed Mac Mini would be the preferred option.  We want to do something before the end of summer so if there isn't any mini update announced soon, we will make a decision on either an iMac or Linux desktop as a replacement.  A WWDC announcement would be nice.  BTW - Not going with Windows under my watch.