I've been wondering about the lack of desktop upgrades. And the fact that there have been no invites yet for an unveiling in this month.
And suddenly I thought, what if they are working on getting some stuff that is normal on the iPhone to the Macs? I'm thinking of neural network hardware as in the A12 chip. Or a true-depth camera on Macs so you can log in with face recognition? If you want the latter, you probably need some fundamental changes in hardware. And if you want that on a future Mac Pro, you need a separate truedepth camera. And you might even need an even faster bus than Thunderbolt 3 if you get these separated components perform really well (fiber?). And you need a lot of changes in the OS to support it all, especially extra chips (a T-something chip with a x-core neural network engine). Such developments take a lot if time and energy, because it also touches a lot of software.
As thing stand now, the only explanation for the very slow pace of hardware releases seems to me that they are going to come up with some revolutionary stuff. It's either that or total incompetence. But the iPhone stuff suggests they are very competent. So, I'm guessing that they are aiming for fundamentally different hardware, with multiple chips in a multi-chip hardware setup) and that this is very, very hard to do (and they might have even taken more on than they can manage).
So, the longer it takes, the higher my expectations and of course the larger the disappointment if the updates are mediocre.
But I can see a November announcement including the announcement of a shipping MacPro in early 2019.
And suddenly I thought, what if they are working on getting some stuff that is normal on the iPhone to the Macs? I'm thinking of neural network hardware as in the A12 chip. Or a true-depth camera on Macs so you can log in with face recognition? If you want the latter, you probably need some fundamental changes in hardware. And if you want that on a future Mac Pro, you need a separate truedepth camera. And you might even need an even faster bus than Thunderbolt 3 if you get these separated components perform really well (fiber?). And you need a lot of changes in the OS to support it all, especially extra chips (a T-something chip with a x-core neural network engine). Such developments take a lot if time and energy, because it also touches a lot of software.
As thing stand now, the only explanation for the very slow pace of hardware releases seems to me that they are going to come up with some revolutionary stuff. It's either that or total incompetence. But the iPhone stuff suggests they are very competent. So, I'm guessing that they are aiming for fundamentally different hardware, with multiple chips in a multi-chip hardware setup) and that this is very, very hard to do (and they might have even taken more on than they can manage).
So, the longer it takes, the higher my expectations and of course the larger the disappointment if the updates are mediocre.
But I can see a November announcement including the announcement of a shipping MacPro in early 2019.