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Next-Generation iMac Chip, Stand, and Color Details Rumored Ahead of Apple Event
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The iMac will have a product manager. Any new iMac will also have a senior project manager.
Tim Cook is not needed for the iMac product.
The iMac fills its niche well. It owns the niche in many ways. Other companies do have AIO, and I've priced out the HP version in my shopping to replace my old iMac, but the HP is a real throw-back compared to even the Intel iMac.
Home computers are a mature market. The biggest thing that has happened the past 10 years is making TVs smarter and smarter to the point where they can be full on web browsers, etc.
The next evolution in the home computer is to get rid of the keyboard and mouse as the haptic interface.
The AVP is an experiment to that end, but it is clear we are still several years away from giving up the keyboard and pointing device.
That's my plan.
I currently boot my old iMac from an external SSD. Works well. It's the only way to get these ancient Intel iMacs to operate a decent speed.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
When you are finally successful, brace yourself for the other number: the price. I strongly believe iMac "bigger" will be resurrected, branded PRO and priced about the same as last iMac 27" PRO.
Any concept that the old iMac 27" pricing will also resurrect can't seem to fly. If the iMac 27" monitor alone (ASD) is priced at about $2K with stand option, adding a whole Mac + keyboard + mouse to it seems the price must considerably rise above $2K.
Brand it PRO (for PROfit) and my guess is "starting at..." about 2X what we remember as iMac 27" "starting at...". Those specs will probably be too weak, so upgrading RAM and SSD a tier or two should get into Mac Studio + ASD + keyboard + mouse territory.
If your hope is old pricing, I'll hope right with you.... but I just can't imagine $2K ASD and $2K (same monitor) iMac + Keyboard + Mouse. So for former iMac pricing, Apple would have to heavily cut ASD pricing and I don't see any reason for them to do that now that it is established at former "whole iMac 27" pricing.
My dentist loves his M1 iMac. I doubt he sees the need for anything more.
I bet the majority of M1 iMac users are quite fine with what they have.
They’ve done music for years thanks to iPod and should have gotten into monthly music subscription streaming years ago when Jimmy Iovine was trying to persuade Jobs to do it well before Spotify existed. When Apple literally controlled music.
Movies and TV are different because the video steaming category was well established by the likes of Netflix and then Amazon and Disney. Apple didn’t have the balls to acquire MGM like Cue wanted and Amazon did, and so should they have stayed out and allowed those guys to battle it out there.
Arcade is a POC and a half-arsed attempt. Apple should have just plonked down $50B and acquired several big games and found a way to make them Apple TV exclusive (and possibly rebrand the hardware as Apple Home) and made the best damn first-party controller there is on the market with senseless magnetic charging (to a wire for playing while charging and to the top of the puck when controllers are stored there magnetically) and pairing to the device. AAA gaming would be Apple’s in to be the centre of the living room, and then boom, the following year an AIO OLED Apple television running Apple software with everything built in. Rich people would buy the TV, everyone else would get the separate device. Both would be high powered offering the latest M-series chip built with AAA gaming in mind. A subscription service every teen on the planet wanted and they’d buy an Apple Home to get it.
Oh, and these games would work on Mac too, thus helping to fix the anaemic Mac gaming situation. So the big investment helps the Mac too.
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My iMac has 16GB, which should be the standard in almost 2024. An M3, bump in RAM, same price, that’s worth selling M1. I’d select a 32GB RAM option with color matched trackpad. Black bezels will sell me fast.
I’d also take a larger 32” M3 Max with 128GB RAM and black bezels and height adjustable stand. Next time Tim?
I’d also take a larger 32” M3 Max with 128GB RAM and black bezels and height adjustable stand. Next time Tim?
For real. Today I had a student in class struggle with Adobe Illustrator (an old dog of an app gobbling up a whopping 4 GB of memory), Keynote (which was also eating up 2 GB of memory, yikes!), the Finder (I don't exactly know how, but it was also using up well in excess of 1 GB of memory) and Chrome (which, at ≈800 MB of memory consumption, was surprisingly well-behaved by comparison).
Guess what: she had a base model, M2 Pro 14'' MacBook Pro (yes, the “real” one, not the absurd Touch Bar model), which means the bottleneck wasn't in the CPU cores, but the base 16 GB of RAM and, I suspect, the 512 GB of storage (likely on a single chip, but do correct me if I'm wrong)… I casually mentioned that my supposedly lowly vanilla M2 MacBook Air was actually more capable for that use case just due to it having more memory (the maxed-out 24 GB option) and more storage spread across multiple chips, because it effectively is.
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Apple is abusing the public’s lack of knowledge to sell and upsell. Sadly common. I wish Apple could find something besides SSD and RAM to make absurd profit margin on.
They also exemplify the problem with “starts at” pricing. They want to say they have a computer on sale for $999 despite the fact you can’t get out the door for that and if you do it’s not *quite* the computer it could be.
There’s no car analogy unfortunately. Nobody sells a cheap car that only goes a top speed of 65 and has plastic seats but is cheap. Cars can only go so low so computer companies get away with things car companies had outlawed decades ago.
That was then. This is now. It’s time for Apple to give us the upgrades they know we want. Or at least cut the exorbitant cost of upgrading RAM and SSDs. Or there will be more and more of us being drawn to the competition. No company is infallible. And Apple has been demonstrating a remarkable case of tone deafness lately.
If they don't make it in Midnight and Space Grey, then whoever makes that executive decision should be fired.
Ok, if you think it was "then", let's hop on over the Dell Computer (one of the major US companies for PCs)... and what do we find?
No less than 10 different models of AIOs with RAM of 8GB: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/des...ops/all-in-one?appliedRefinements=38623,38697
Worse: it does feel like a BMW that not only lacks heated seats, but has also a gimped engine which you cannot upgrade after the fact. And they still sell you iCloud+ because, duh, of course you'll run out of space on your 256 GB, non-upgradeable SSD. It borders on criminal, actually.
I threw in the towel and moved on to the Studio, after an uninterrupted streak of four iMacs with increasingly big and better screens (last revision 17'' G4, Rev. A 20'' G5, OG 27'' Intel from 2009, 27'' 5K 2017, bought in early 2019 and still boxed and awaiting a buyer)… And I suspect a lot of others did, too, thus leaving the iMac to fill in its traditional role of home/school/office computer/fancy POS terminal.
Even if you discard the 8GB RAM filter (AKA don’t consider RAM)
Yuck!, all the Dell AIO only have HD (1920x1080) resolution. Both their 24” and 27” displays. The same resolution the Apple 21.5” (non-retina) display had in 2009
I'm the editor and publisher for a large university, and the M1 iMac has been absolutely incredible for dealing with print production titles rammed with very high-res photography, 4K editing, and a lot more besides. It absolutely tears through the work. I also have an M2 Pro 16" MBP, which is only marginally quicker. My only real complaint with the iMac is the size of the display, and the attendant lack of 5K. Saying that it's a machine only useful in a home or amateur setting is wildly short of the truth.
Concur.
Remembering back to my working days, the current iMac is more than capable for project management, all clerical work, the entire contract and delivery departments, etc.
It also is quite capable for software engineering.
Apple markets it to the home and education environments because those are markets in which the iMac is an ideal offering. But that does not mean it can't do excellently in a professional environment.
I didn’t say that. And a major university is not a typical education environment. You’re clearly lucky to have some budget.
My main point is that people would be better served with more ram and storage than a marginal processor bump, which you seem to agree with. I didn’t say they’re only useful at home. I said the main things they are used for don’t need more processing power right now, which again you clearly agree with.
Qualcomm just laid off 1400 people. Many of them were on important engineering projects. Did they say anything about that?
Something I am taking into consideration is whether a Mac of any sort can do a good job with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield. That will determine what my next Mac will be, or if I need to instead buy a new PC for those two games. Is that an issue for anyone else?
Apple's upcoming iMac refresh will feature a new chip, an internally redesigned stand, and a similar array of color options to the current model, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Following Apple's announcement of its "Scary Fast" event scheduled for Monday, October 30, Gurman reposted a Power On newsletter published in March on X (formerly Twitter) and reiterated several key details:
The main change to the iMac will apparently be its processor, with the new machine featuring Apple's M3 chip. The current model has the M1 chip and Gurman has repeatedly said that the iMac will skip the M2 chip entirely. He previously remarked that he expects it to be "one of the company's first M3-based machines."
Gurman mentioned the new iMac's internally redesigned stand back in March, explaining that "the computer will see some of its internal components relocated and redesigned, and the manufacturing process for attaching the iMac's stand is different." According to his latest comments, the internally redesigned stand remains on the new machine.
The current, M1-based iMac is available in green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. In March, Gurman said that the new iMac was being tested in orange, pink, blue, and silver finishes. Gurman has now reiterated his claim that the color options of the new machine will remain "similar," which suggests that there may still be some changes.
The next-generation iMac is otherwise expected to be the same as the current 24-inch model. Gurman's information indicates that the new iMac entered mass production sometime between June and August, suggesting that it is now ready to launch.
Article Link: Next-Generation iMac Chip, Stand, and Color Details Rumored Ahead of Apple Event
Well lookie what we have here. Another update that has been in the making for months. So much for that tutti fruitti, phoney baloney, plastic banana, good time rock-n-roll Apple PR hype that this update was JUST decided because Apple is on the BLEEDING EDGE! Apple has mastered the clear upgrade path with the iterative updates. They learned a good lesson with the original HomePod.