Thanks! I let him borrow my Mac mini for a weekend when I visited my parents and I walked him through everything and taught him how it works (I recently got him an iPhone SE so it will work nicely with Mac mini) he loves it. my OP wasn't clear. the possible "more powerful" Mac mini M1/M2 would be for me, and then I would give him my current entry level Mac mini M1 2020. but if there isn't anything new announced June ill just get him another entry level M1 mini like mine
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What are the chances of new Mac mini refresh announced in June/July?
- Thread starter kofman13
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Huh? The iPhone ships in the fall with the new version of iOS, but developers (other than a very select few) rarely know the new hardware specs before the fall event. Mac developers should be targeting Intel Macs because those are what most users have, and making sure apps have acceptable performance on M1. Unless developers want to limit their potential user base to the select few who will be purchasing the new hardware.
Developers know about the new iOS. That’s what WWDC is all about to make developers aware.
Apple could do a huge upgrade by putting in a M2X in it. An iPad chip M1 / A14X doesn’t belong in a Mac Mini as it has much better cooling capabilities.
But Apple will not do it because it is their “budget” computer. However technically, the Mac Mini can house a much more powerful chip.
Apple has a history of announcing hardware at WWDC. They don’t do it every year, but it’s not unreasonable at all to expect new hardware this year. Rumors are that the next iteration of Mac chips have started production. M1 had about 5 weeks of lead time before the announcement, and that was used in 3 top-selling macs. The higher-end models that would likely get announced ship less volume so they easily could have chips ready shortly after WWDC this year.
WWDC New Hardware History:
2010: iPhone 4
2012: MBA, MBP
2013: MP, AirPort, MBA,
2017: iMac, MB, MBP, iMac Pro, iPad, HP
2019: Mac Pro, Pro Display
2020: Dev Transition Kit
Macs that still need updating:
4-port Mac Mini
4-port 13” MBP
16” MBP
27” iMac
Mac Pro
Not really.
In 2013 they announced a new MBA that shipped on June 10th.
In 2017 they announced and shipped 7 new macs, MBA, 13” MBP, 13” MBP (2 port), 15” MBP, HD iMac, 4K iMac, 5K iMac , ALL available on June 5th.
In 2020 the TDK was available on June 22nd for shipping.
Apple announced Mac Pro, Pro Display, and iMac Pro at WWDC and shipped in December. Those were special announcements geared towards a very niche group for a specific reason. Two of those products were brand new categories, and one hadn’t been updated in 6 years. Pro’s we’re losing faith in Apple.
In the last 6 years Apple has never announced a Mac at WWDC and delayed shipping until the fall.
Zero....as others have mentioned, apple will likely have their supply chain focused on replacing other intel based systems as a priority before we are likely to see a power or revised Mini. Im super happy with mine as it currently stands - silent and quick.
They still sell a 4-port Intel Mac mini, and that’s what OP was referring to. There’s a decent chance they’ll update that with an M1X processor. M1 mini isn’t getting updated until M2 at the earliest.
We can certainly hope so although with the recent sneaky 10Gbps update to the current Mini I still think they are likely to prioritise other model's given TSMC and others warning chip supply line issues are likely to continue through to 2022. Time will tell and will be the first to offload my Mini to make way for a Mini pro with more ports
WWDC 2017, Apple announced the iMac Pro but that was not available until the Fall.
I never said a DTK would be unavailable, this is the whole point of a developers conference. I said the main products would ship in the fall. Which the M1 Mac mini and other M1s did.
The 2018 high end Mini I use is an Apple CTO with: 6 core i7 + 32GB RAM + 2TB SSD + 10GBe option.
This Intel Mini is used primarily as a caching server (connected to external 16TB drive array) so that might have some impact on the computing ability compared to my M1 Mini which does not have the role of anything except a workstation.
Okay, those are two different applications. I had thought the 2018 stacked up against the 2020 mini, but looking at the benchmark data it doesn't. Even in cases with plenty of ram.
A second gen Apple Silicon mini is likely going to be bananas powerful. I'm just hopeful they'll release some discrete graphics acceleration to support it. I'll be liquidating my old mini, for sure.
There's sufficient reason to think, due to all the applications the higher-end Mini has (i.e.: its even used on AWS EC2 instances, and plenty of cloud Mac computing services), that a Mini with more ports, and more than 16 GB of RAM, its not just an option but a necessity for those lines of business.
16GB of RAM and the external display support, etc. Its simply not enough for IaaS solutions and some of the more demanding use-cases the Mini currently supports.
In other words, Im confident the top of the line Intel Mini will be transitioned along the upper-half of the Mac line that's still pending, and not be discontinued. More so, all of this, the next AS chip, wether M1X or M2 or whatever name it gets, will surely happen this year. The only question being, will the next crop drop at WWDC or until the fall?
16GB of RAM and the external display support, etc. Its simply not enough for IaaS solutions and some of the more demanding use-cases the Mini currently supports.
In other words, Im confident the top of the line Intel Mini will be transitioned along the upper-half of the Mac line that's still pending, and not be discontinued. More so, all of this, the next AS chip, wether M1X or M2 or whatever name it gets, will surely happen this year. The only question being, will the next crop drop at WWDC or until the fall?
That’s not correct though. The iMac Pro was available December 14 2017, not the fall. And like I said in my post, that was a brand new product category, and was meant to ease professionals who were waiting for the Mac Pro. It was a special case. Apple has never done something like that with an iMac or a MacBook Pro.
If Apple announced a new product and delayed shipping for 3 months, they would cannibalizes sales of current macs. They only do this in special cases where a machine hasn’t been updated in 6 years like top end pro machines like the Mac Pro, or when they announce a total brand new product that they don’t sell yet like the iMac Pro or pro display.
Not sure your point on TDK? That’s old hardware. I was just giving examples of when Apple announced and shipped products in June.
I think Apple would love to show off the next level of their transition at WWDC. I think it will be the "Q" series.
But will we see a Q1 there? I think one main problem is the general chip shortage right now.
If they find that manageable, because the Q1 goes into lower volume devices, then maybe. I would expect something like the Q1 in the higher-end Mac mini, the bigger iMac, the 14" and 16" MBP and at some point something like a Q1X for the highest-end MBPs and iMac with even more GPU cores.
But even if they have a Q1 ready doesn't mean that they would show all these devices with the new chip right away.
I personally hope that we will learn more about the future of Apple Silicon at WWDC. And I mean concrete dates, models. Because I need a successor to my 2015 MBP 15 soon And I really, really hope that rumor from some days ago about the next chip being available in the next three months or so is true.
The MBPs are the "developer machines". So it would fit to show them at WWDC. And then maybe throw in some Mac minis and iMacs for good measure.
It would definitely make sense.
But will we see a Q1 there? I think one main problem is the general chip shortage right now.
If they find that manageable, because the Q1 goes into lower volume devices, then maybe. I would expect something like the Q1 in the higher-end Mac mini, the bigger iMac, the 14" and 16" MBP and at some point something like a Q1X for the highest-end MBPs and iMac with even more GPU cores.
But even if they have a Q1 ready doesn't mean that they would show all these devices with the new chip right away.
I personally hope that we will learn more about the future of Apple Silicon at WWDC. And I mean concrete dates, models. Because I need a successor to my 2015 MBP 15 soon
And I really, really hope that rumor from some days ago about the next chip being available in the next three months or so is true.The MBPs are the "developer machines". So it would fit to show them at WWDC. And then maybe throw in some Mac minis and iMacs for good measure.
It would definitely make sense.
The thing is that having more shorter, focused events has proven to be successful. Trying to load up too much into a single event means that some products get lost in the crowd. I wouldn't be surprised to see WWDC focus more on OS innovations, maybe a developer model or two, but then also and event in the Sept/Oct and another in the Nov/Dec timeframe. Sure, the SJT will get less use, but the newer events have been quite effective and are much easier to do.
You were the one that brought the DTK up!
It is way more appropriate to have Apple announce M1X/M2 at WWDC with possibly another DTK so developers can write software for the products they will release in the fall.
If they announce and release products in the fall with better processors, it won’t sell well as developers will need to take months potentially to update their software to take advantage.
Difficult to say. Apple's pretty tight lipped about new/updated product timelines to begin with. Sure, we usually see new iOS & macOS versions announced at WWDC, and new iPhones on September, while Macs have been updated anytime between twice in a year to several years between updates. With Apple having only recently announced Apple Silicon, I'm sure they're still finding their groove. We'll see how often Apple updates their Mac lineup.
I said “I was just giving examples of when Apple announced and shipped products in June.” - There’s no need for a second DTK.
Developers don’t really need to write software for M1X or M2. Software that runs on M1 should run on M1X/M2. It’s the same as writing x86 software for an Intel i5 vs. an Intel i9. They are both the same architecture, just how M1, M1X, M2 are all on the arm architecture. Developers may implement new features found in the new OS, but unless they reveal some new hardware in the chip design that we haven’t seen before on A14 or M1 that requires specific code for that hardware (Unlikely), there’s really no need for this. And if in some super rare case they did do this, they’d likely not announce a new product but they’d announce the feature coming to new chips - not a product. Unless it was ready to ship. This is not the same as compiling x86 code to arm. There is no need for a second DTK.
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Something tells me Macs will be moving to a 2-year refresh cycle going forward. Though I hope I’m wrong.
It would be nice if there was some consistency to it, like iPhones. You know there’s a new one coming every year around the same time.
I could see macs with M1 getting yearly updates, but higher-end pro machines going to an 18-24 month cycle.
There is no chance Apple would name a processor or product Q-anything. The letter is ruined.
This is the best reason to announce updated MBPs. Minis are also development machines--I build on one. I could see higher end iMacs, the recent update seemed a little incomplete at 24".
But I actually think we are more likely to see a Mac Pro for reasons I'll share below.
This is correct, there is no need for a new DTK for an A or M series chip. However:
I have a theory that Apple could release one or more application-specific discrete accelerator cards under the Apple Afterburner card product line that was kicked off in the 2019 Mac Pro.
Such a product would also not warrant a DTK, but it would be worthy of an early announcement with fall availability.
The reason is Apple could share SDKs for such cards that would work (without acceleration) on existing AS machines but can ultimately target the new hardware in the fall.
As I understand it, even with more cores and memory, the M-series SoC design can not compete with the compute offered by discrete GPUs.
Apple's only foray into discrete GPUs that worked with laptops and the mini has been in their collaboration with Blackmagic for the RX580 and Vega 56 eGPU products. (I have the RX580 BM on my 2018 mini pushing to the XDR Pro and use it for general purposes.)
That said, those discrete, general purpose cards are not only currently incompatible with the M-series Mac mini and laptops, the cards are very weak in the context of today's GPU cards in a very important areas of software development: machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Much focus has been put on NVIDIA and their major strides in delivering powerful high performance computing (HPC). In fact, NVIDIA announced the ARM-based Grace CPU just a few weeks ago, which is focused on helping "scientists and researchers to train the world’s largest models to solve the most complex problems." That sounds like the kind of space Apple would want to dominate.
NVIDIA's Grace CPU product page has the quote: "Continuing to scale [AI models] for accuracy and usefulness requires fast access to a large pool of memory and a tight coupling of the CPU and GPU." Doesn't that sound familiar?
I realize this is going out on a limb a bit, but I think Apple could demo a Mac Mini and/or Mac Pro featuring an AI/ML optimized discrete "accelerator" card. Something like Afterburner ML that lives in an external enclosure or as a Mac Pro Expansion (MPX) module.
Beyond the desire to get developers ready to take advantage of such a card by writing software for it, if the performance of Apple Silicon purpose-built accelerator cards is as mindblowing as the M1 was, the news could immediately freeze hardware spending and force IT managers to re-evaluate plans for capital investment budgets for 2022.
To some extent what you say here fits with the theory an Afterburner ML card is a component to a new product (MX). Which is sort of a feature coming to new chips.
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