Apple to revamp desktop Macs
New Pros and minis in August, apparently
Apple will refresh its Mac Pro and Mac Mini desktop computers in August, with the new range featuring Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPUs and Thunderbolt, the company’s latest high-speed peripheral interface developed in collaboration with Intel.
The unofficial news of these Mac desktop arrivals come from the Twitter account of CNet’s Brian Tong whose previous predictions on Apple product launches have turned out to be accurate.
His initial posting reported that the new models would launch at the end of July/ first week in August, with a later post emphasing August as the launch date and that Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt would appear on both. No other specs were known.
The timing of these news models would certainly tie in nicely with the launch of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion but also implies that the July release of Apple’s revamped operating system will happen in later in that month.
Both the Mac Pro and the Mac mini are around a year old now, and given Apple’s past form a refresh seems timely. Other reports recently have suggested that the MacBook Air will also be fitted out with the Sandy Bridge/Thunderbolt combo and that all new products launches are on hold until after the Mac OS X Lion launch. The MacBook Pro and iMac ranges have already seen this hardware upgrade and you can read our review of the 27in model here. ®
COMMENTS
Mac not MAC
It's short for Macintosh, it's not an acronym you see.
HTH
The Pro's are a work of art, my 2008 model can still carry an amazing amount of load without getting stressed.
They will learn....
...when people stop buying enough of them at the current price.
It may be expensive but it's a lovely machine.
Won't happen
If they drop the Mac Mini to £399 then it makes the iPad price seem daft and we all know that other tablet makers have struggled to beat the iPad price.
Don't get me wrong
We'll still get a Mac Pro, but at the moment, rendering with the Macbook Pro beats the 8-core hands-down and is so close to a 12-core it's unreal. Given that the Macbook Pro is about the same cost as the 8-core and MUCH cheaper than the 12-core it's a no-brainer.
Ram is certainly an issue, and the price of 16GB for a Macbook should be illegal. Storage is not so much of an issue, because that all lives on a gigabit LAN, so that it is shared. Optical media is not used enough to worry about how many drives in a single machine. It's also true that the multiple GPUs in the Mac Pro also help rendering, but at the moment it's still loosing.
Also the Macbook will be a useful toy/tool for on-site demonstrations later.
