Skylake MacBooks - silent update next week

[dj23andMe]

Forbes reports Apple began production of new MacBooks in the second quarter of 2016. Pointing to Skylake not Kaby Lake CPUs.

Reports students have been holding off from buying new Macbooks at the Stanford campus computer store perhaps puts tremendous pressure on Apple to update sooner rather than later. http://web.stanford.edu/group/bookstore/SUprices/macintoshall.html

On October 4th Dell will introduce Kaby Lake CPUs to the XPS 13 ultra notebook line. Google has a major announcement on October 4th (perhaps a new Pixel). Apple...


MacBook Air --> Skylake

Retina MacBook Pro --> Skylake

MacBook Pro ??

iMac --> Skylake

Mac Mini --> Skylake

 

[Samuelsan2001]

The better Kabylake chips with the better graphics options faster clock speeds and higher wattage and performance used in all apples macs except the MacBook Air will not be released until next year. So yes they will use Skylake there is no other choice but to use inferior chips that bench less than the current broadwell and haswell.

 

[maflynn]

Forbes reports Apple began production of new MacBooks in the second quarter of 2016. Pointing to Sky Lake not Kaby Lake CPUs.

That's because the Kaby lake versions that go into the MBPs and iMacs are not out yet. Dell is using the the 13W Kaby lake CPU

The 27" iMac is already on Skylake, so I wonder what if anything they'll do to that.

 

[shaunp]

Bit of a poor update if that's all they do. Especially if they leave the rMBP 15" with a 16GB RAM limitation. My stop-gap XPS 15 might become a bit more permanent if there's no increase to the RAM.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Whats up with those enormeous images that adds nothing to your post OP? Could you please remove them?

 

[theluggage]

Pointing to Sky Lake not Kaby Lake CPUs.

Frankly, I'm not that worried about which particular body of inland water the CPU comes from - the current rMBP processors are more than capable enough for most people.

The issues are over things like Thunderbolt 3/USB-C (& that is a two-edged sword) and the type of GPU in the top-end rMBP. For others it will be whether the new 13" rMBP hits the spot as a "retina MacBook Air" or if there's going to be a larger MacBook.

Just dropping a skylake chip into the existing models would be pretty unexciting.

Kaby Lake might have implications for the number of USB-C/TB3 ports: since it has an on-chip TB3 controller it would mean that MacBook/MacBook airs could have 2xTB3 without a separate controller chip and, potentially, the "Pro" machines could have 4... but that's just implications - Apple could still contrive to put as many or as few ports as they like in a Skylake machine.

NB: 27" iMac is already on Skylake (and 21.5" iMac is just a desk ornament) so that's just waiting on potential new GPUs and TB3.

A Mac Mini with the Intel Skull Canyon chipset would be cool (or, more likely, hot) though.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Bit of a poor update if that's all they do. Especially if they leave the rMBP 15" with a 16GB RAM limitation. My stop-gap XPS 15 might become a bit more permanent if there's no increase to the RAM.

And they won't just do that of course, there are currently many good upgrade options Apple can use, kaby lake just isn't one of them.

 

[merkinmuffley]

Skylake...and Apple will again be playing catch up with other vendors.

 

[maflynn]

Skylake...and Apple will again be playing catch up with other vendors.

Yup, Apple's competition is transitioning to Kaby Lake, meanwhile Apple is finally moving towards Skylake.

 

[sublunar]

Forbes reports Apple began production of new MacBooks in the second quarter of 2016. Pointing to Skylake not Kaby Lake CPUs.

Reports students have been holding off from buying new Macbooks at the Stanford campus computer store perhaps puts tremendous pressure on Apple to update sooner rather than later. http://web.stanford.edu/group/bookstore/SUprices/macintoshall.html

On October 4th Dell will introduce Kaby Lake CPUs to the XPS 13 ultra notebook line. Google has a major announcement on October 4th (perhaps a new Pixel). Apple...


MacBook Air --> Skylake

Retina MacBook Pro --> Skylake

MacBook Pro ??

iMac --> Skylake

Mac Mini --> Skylake

MBA and Retina Macbook can go Kaby Lake now if they wanted, other manufacturers (like Dell above, and HP) have started showing off their latest models using the 15w chips. See the i7 and i5 options.

Mac Mini could well go all Kaby Lake 15w parts if the Kaby Lake HD620 GPU is good enough to match the Iris Graphics 5100 on the Haswell CPU. It is, after all, Apple's most energy efficient desktop and if the MBA gets updated there's got to be some economies of scale to be had...

Macbook Pro 13" has 28w Kaby Lake parts coming in about 5-6 months so Skylake seems sensible for that. Ominously, the 15" version has no date set for Iris Pro Kaby Lake parts with recent rumours suggesting that the 45w parts may end with Skylake. Both therefore would probably go Skylake.

AMDs power efficient Polaris GPUs may be cheap enough to be added to every 15" model, especially since Apple could now offer a 45w 4 core (but no hyper threading) i5 to lower the entry price if they wanted to. If they served up Skylake CPUs it's still an upgrade, even if they don't bother with the OLED Function key strip and USB-C/Thunderbolt 3.

I'd suspect any major update will rely on the Mac Pro getting updated to Broadwell-EP with refreshed AMD FirePro graphics and USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 at the same time. After all, we wouldn't want the Mac Pro to look even more outdated with old ports.

 

[dj23andMe]

Skylake or A10...

Dutch site TechTastic dug through the macOS kernel to find support for a new CPU family called “ARM Hurricane.”

There’s one more bit of evidence.

TechTastic notes that macOS Sierra also changes the way developers submit third-party Mac apps. Basically, it allows Apple to automatically convert those apps between ARM and Intel platforms.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/09/30/new-macbooks-arm-processors-intel/

 

[andiwm2003]

The MBP will get the OLED function key strip, that much is sure. Since this affects the UI it's likely they will bring this feature across all notebooks. That would be a design change and certainly not done in a silent update for any of the notebooks. There will be at some point a Mac event where they bring new models. I think it's unlikely that they release before that a skylake or kaby lake Macbook with 10% more performance in a silent update. It's just not worth the development costs.

 

[sublunar]

Skylake or A10...

Dutch site TechTastic dug through the macOS kernel to find support for a new CPU family called “ARM Hurricane.”

There’s one more bit of evidence.

TechTastic notes that macOS Sierra also changes the way developers submit third-party Mac apps. Basically, it allows Apple to automatically convert those apps between ARM and Intel platforms.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/09/30/new-macbooks-arm-processors-intel/

If correct then we're going back to FAT binaries. More storage will be required. But I'd have thought that Apple would go down the route of offering ARM CPUs in the product that became the Retina Macbook - and that product seems very popular right now.

I also though that Apple would restrict software for such a future machine to the App store only.

If the Retina Macbook is staying Intel then is there room for a cheaper product to replace the Ivy Bridge Macbook Pro, and would that in effect be an iPad Pro 2 that can run OS X? Surely something that big would be announced at WWDC first along with the hardware?