We've decided to go with the slowest hard drives possible for yet another year, even in our flagship 4K 21.5" iMac. Some may ask, why would Apple do this? Cheap? No, friends. Because, courage.
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"hello again" Connecting the dots
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We've decided to go with the slowest hard drives possible for yet another year, even in our flagship 4K 21.5" iMac. Some may ask, why would Apple do this? Cheap? No, friends. Because, courage.
Now that the rumour is the iMac is being delayed for another year...I'm hoping Apple does something drastic.
Go all in on the new TB Display
Reduce the desktop Mac lineup to two Macs, the Mac and Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro would use the current Mac Pro but with an i7-7700k, and dual Vega graphics cards.
The Mac, would use a newer smaller implementation of the Mac Pro with a cheaper processor, a single or integrated graphics chip with a single SATA bay. Essentially becoming a cross between the mini and Pro.
The iMac would then die because the new TB displays would only need a single cable for everything, power and data. It will also come in multiple sizes. The Mac, and Mac Pro would pull power from the TB displays as well.
Then price it so the price point match the old iMac's price range, with a little more on the top for the Pro configuration.
Or go even further and just include integrated graphics in both the Mac and Mac Pro, and allow you to order the display 1 or 2 Vega video cards.
Just an off the wall thought. Just turn the new display into what has been the iMac.
Go all in on the new TB Display
Reduce the desktop Mac lineup to two Macs, the Mac and Mac Pro.The Mac Pro would use the current Mac Pro but with an i7-7700k, and dual Vega graphics cards.
The Mac, would use a newer smaller implementation of the Mac Pro with a cheaper processor, a single or integrated graphics chip with a single SATA bay. Essentially becoming a cross between the mini and Pro.
The iMac would then die because the new TB displays would only need a single cable for everything, power and data. It will also come in multiple sizes. The Mac, and Mac Pro would pull power from the TB displays as well.
Then price it so the price point match the old iMac's price range, with a little more on the top for the Pro configuration.
Or go even further and just include integrated graphics in both the Mac and Mac Pro, and allow you to order the display 1 or 2 Vega video cards.
Just an off the wall thought. Just turn the new display into what has been the iMac.
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My first question for you would be:
1. To whom is the 27 5K iMac really aimed at?
When it was introduced in 2014, it wasn't as the next generation of casual computing, it was as a pro machine that offered a world class screen that even a truly "pro" desktop couldn't match. It was aimed at photographers, video editors, and others for whom the extra resolution would really and truly matter.
While it's certainly true that as the 5K screen has migrated down into the lower end 27" models, Apple has created a 5K iMac that is really more for the casual user with too much discretionary income and not enough common sense (given the poor performance of the lowest end model), I don't think your characterization of the 5K iMac as being aimed at "more mainstream apps" (for example?) is necessarily correct.
While I do agree with you that Apple does, and should value single threaded performance in the iMac (and across their product lineup) (as they should), all the indications are that, as long as AMD can deliver on clock speed, we're looking at at least Haswell levels of single core performance which is more than adequate for even poorly threaded apps. If Apple can have haswell levels of single core performance, AND more cores (and possibly even a lower price), I think that would be a very attractive proposition for both Apple AND consumers.
Given that the 5K iMac is a machine serving many markets, including pro and semi-pro, I think there is definitely room for (at least a high end model) supporting Zen/Vega/HSA. One of the things that could make this combination so attractive is that an APU could dramatically reduce the required board space and TDP requirements for a high end CPU and GPU, giving Apple more room for cooling, new features or, god forbid, additional thinnovation.
I would disagree with the above assertion. Over the past five years, Apple has shown that they have come to care about graphics in the iMac. The 680MX in 2012 was a revolution for an all in one, and featured performance within striking distance of some of Nvidia's top end desktop chips, and while the R9 295MX and R9 395MX have been less impressive in this regard, they still offer solid performance within the TDP (and manufacturer) Apple has had to work with. That and the mobile variants of these cards do often have MSRPs over ~$600, although I don't think anyone believes Apple actually pays that much.
Furthermore, while i didn't mention this in the initial post, lower end APU's could of course utilize a Zen/Polaris APU and forgo HSA to keep costs down.
Whats important to Apple (IMO) is how much performance they can get into a given design, and what kind of differentiation they can offer the market. I think AMD's APU's offer Apple interesting options on this front.
Things like HSA would be interesting, and something Apple might go for if it offered an advantage. But that looks more interesting in the Mini than the iMac right now. Considering one of the things Apple is doing is making the fastest Quad Core Skylake chips Intel offers available to customers.
My own bets are that Intel is here to stay in the iMac for the time being. AMD has a couple of good niches, and Zen offers some options in those niches, but I don't think the iMac aligns with those niches all that well. And I don't think ARM is even equal to AMD. I agree that if there is a switch, AMD is a better bet than ARM, but I don't think AMD is a great bet either.
That said, if Zen could make the Mac Pro a bit cheaper again while being generous with the cores, and offer up some serious GPU hardware in the form of Vega... I might just consider buying a Mac Pro again instead of an iMac. But I would miss that sweet single-thread perf the i7 line has.
I'll agree with you, (and most people in this thread), the probability, particularly for this event this week, is probably pretty slim, and I'm not expecting it so much as just throwing it out there to start discussion and see if anyone else sees what I see.
One more quick thing. In responding to your post, I thought about how Apple initially released the 5K screen only on the high end iMac and kept the old (at the time 2013) iMacs around as a lower cost option.
While I've been pretty skeptical of the iMac Pro idea, I now realize the precedent for a "high end"/
"pro" iMac which compliments and doesn't replace the current models, is certainly there. While I certainly hope it doesn't replace the Mac Pro, I'm hopeful that perhaps our resident analyst who said "probably iMac not ready yet" just wasn't looking in the right places
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"casual user with too much discretionary income", yes that's me. Speaking for myself, I got sick of putting together high-end PCs running Windows, then not doing any gaming whatsoever, just the occassional Photoshop, work stuff etc.
My i5 iMac is considerably faster than any (recent) i5-based Windows PC. Plus the screen, well... is just gorgeous.
I think Apple is making a big mistake if they leave their desktop line-up untouched for another year (or 6 months). On the other hand I don't see people making a switch to e.g. a Surface all-in-one desktop PC if that's what Microsoft is coming up with.
Microsoft is just trying to shake up the shrinking Windows desktop market with something different.
Apple's sales are also shrinking, but that's more related to the lack of innovation / new stuff.
Personally, I don't think its a decision that's based on some business plan, but rather something in the pipeline for the iMac is not available. To put it another way, they wanted to release a new iMac but something prevented them from doing so. Either way, the effect will be the same, as you mentioned. Higher competition with more current hardware equals lower sales.
I agree that Photographers and Video Editors got the benefits. But I don't think they were the only market. One of the reasons I want a 5K iMac is not just for photography, but code. Anything that improves the quality of text for me is actually a benefit. My eyes prefer a retina display when working with lots of text, but I've been trying to hold off on getting a 5K so that I wasn't dumping my 2013 immediately.
Keep in mind that migration is driven by price of the screen. It was always intended to migrate that way, but Apple has seemingly taken an approach where if the higher screen can be sold at a 200$ premium or less, go ahead and introduce it rather than waiting for the price to drop further. And don't force all customers to buy it at the 200$ premium.
The catch with any chip going super-wide with cores is that you are trading off single threaded performance for cores that may never actually get used in many cases. That limits the applicability of such a chip to your user base. Combine that with the need for two logic board designs (one for Intel, one for AMD) if you only want to offer Zen to a set of your customers, and I think the whole thing is a bit a of a non-starter. If you were already happy with an iMac for these use cases, Zen isn't going to change your world all that drastically.
Some good examples are things like Lightroom where they start bottoming out in terms of benefit after 4 cores or so. Photoshop isn't much better, where specific filters will use as much as you can throw at it, but in general is not nearly as multithreaded as people would think. Video Editing is probably the one use case that I completely agree that more cores will get you further. As does programming work on larger projects. These use cases are partly why I think the Mac Pro itself is still an important piece of the line up, despite Apple's ignoring it. And I honestly think Zen would show up there before it would show up in an iMac for the reasons that Zen is aimed at a similar niche. It doesn't help that these same use cases are also trying to figure out how to scale using GPGPU programming, which doesn't help make the case for Zen, IMO.
Now, if Apple were to replace the Mac Pro with an iMac Pro of some kind, I could buy that two logic board designs make sense, and the user could pick Zen if they knew the extra cores would actually make a difference.
But if you also told me that the Mac Pro's refresh would use Vega and Zen as a way to bump up performance and bring down price (assuming Zen is cheaper than a similar Xeon), that makes the most sense with how the lineup is currently placed. To me anyhow.
The problem there is that Apple will never pass along those savings to the customer. And Vega isn't aimed to replace something like the 395MX, it's aimed to take on the Titan if you believe the buzz circulating. It's not going to be a cheap GPU, and it's going to have to perform miracles in order to fit in the TDP of a 395MX. Would Apple actually bulk up the iMac to make room for something like that? History says they won't.
But if you want to see why Apple picked the 295 and 395, look at the general compute. At least on early paper, the AMD chips were pushing more processing cores that could be used in general compute (I think the reality wasn't quite so clear-cut though). The new mobile Pascal chips look to tip that in favor of nVidia, which is partly why I'm confused Sierra is showing Polaris drivers and no Pascal drivers.
But of course, a good chunk of nVidia's performance superiority in GPGPU depends on CUDA which Apple really couldn't care less about.
I wouldn't make that statement. I just read an article comparing different generations of Dell's XPS 13 using the same class of CPU in which a Kaby Lake notebook with Intel HD 620 convincingly bested a Skylake notebook with Iris Graphics (64MB eDRAM). There was no comparison with the Iris Pro (as Dell has never put that in its XPS 13), but it is safe to say that Intel's HD 620 is no slouch and probably sits in between the Skylake with Iris and Skylake with Iris Pro.
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Off topic, but It's these kind of benchmarks that make me think that 15w Kaby Lake CPUs with HD620 may just have found their way into the next Macbook Pro 13" rather than the 28w Skylake equivalent which you'd expect Apple to use.
It may stand to reason that Apple will consolidate 5w Intel CPUs for Macbook, 15w CPU for 13" Macbook Pro, and the 45w Skylake CPU + AMD GPU for 15" Macbook Pro.
Intel appear to be slowly withdrawing development for Iris Pro, especially in their mobile CPUs, which could lead to problems down the line for their desktops - is there an Iris Pro variant of the Kaby Lake desktop CPU on the cards? This would surely affect the 21.5" iMac.
If Apple have any plans to introduce a 21.5" 4k DCI-P3 Cinema Display for those laptop users who don't need a 5k display, will they be adding a GPU to that too?
Could you see a 21.5" iMac in 2017 being outpaced by a 13" Macbook Pro connected to a 5k cinema display with GPU for some FCPX benchmarks?
Back on-topic, I think you'd also have to consider that Apple may have some sort of exclusivity discount with Intel, but the real deal-breaker for Apple on this idea is that Thunderbolt is an Intel technology - I haven't seen anything from AMD that suggests that they are doing much with that except perhaps developing GPUs that connect to Thunderbolt 3 - hmmm - GPU in an external display?
Hello Again is just hello, again, we're back with another announcement.
The hello part is obviously a Mac thing, Hello World thing, programmer thing and the Again part is obviously the Siri integration into the actual Mac itself. Like, the Mac and iPhone merge.
So, AI Macs. Again Intelligent Macs.
Something something.
Does this make sense?
Over and out!
The hello part is obviously a Mac thing, Hello World thing, programmer thing and the Again part is obviously the Siri integration into the actual Mac itself. Like, the Mac and iPhone merge.
So, AI Macs. Again Intelligent Macs.
Something something.
Does this make sense?
Over and out!
We are thinking along similar lines. I also would not be surprised to see a 15W dual core Kaby Lake with HD 620 in a 13" MBP. I just don't know what Apple will do if they choose to use Skylake with Iris Pro this round. There have been many rumors that Intel has ceased production of the Iris Pro after Skylake. There is no evidence of Iris Pro after Skylake on any Intel road maps--not for Kaby Lake, not for Coffee Lake, not for Cannon Lake.
I do wonder if Apple will introduce TB3 or only USB-C 3.1 on Thursday. I don't think Apple's use of TB would lock Apple into Intel chipsets because Apple did collaborate with Intel to develop TB. Consequently, I would think Apple could use TB with an AMD chipset if it shares the IP rights with Intel.
Adding to the 15w Kaby Lake for Macbook Pro suggestion, Apple could specify a 25w TDP-up for an i5-7200U, for example. If the case is still designed to dissipate 28w, a 15w Kaby Lake CPU can stay in turbo mode for longer with a raised CPU frequency because Apple declare that the cooling solution can handle it, or go cooler because the user is in a warm country, hot room, or has been caning it for a long time.
Crucially, an i5-7200U at 25w runs at 2.7GHz, which is the same clock speed as the i5-5257U which is the CPU in the base Macbook Pro 13" and crucially a 1 architecture and 2 generations older Broadwell CPU.
As for USB-C vs Thunderbolt 3 - it might confuse matters for people if Apple rolled out USB-C across the board without TB3 on anything more than the basic Macbook. They'd have to supply TB2 ports on the Pro models for a start, which would be strange. They already have to explain why a Kaby Lake (third revision) Macbook has Thunderbolt 3 whereas the earlier models haven't.
Returning to the iMac, Apple have already put mobile chips into the iMac 21.5" but if the entire range is going Retina they could consolidate again on the CPUs they buy and go with standard Kaby Lake ones when they come out next year - simply adding an AMD GPU with all models for compute. With all those extra pixels to move and the opportunity to add SSD as standard I'm sure Phil Schiller can come up with something to offset any lower clock speeds that come about from selecting mobile CPUs or T series desktop chips to offset an AMD GPU.