WHY has NO ONE mentioned THIS? M4 Mac Redesign

Mark Gurman has been MIA for a while, and lets be honest, so have I, but we’re both back now and news has dropped from the gurmanator that we have a whole swath of Macs coming before the end of the year, and at LEAST one will have more “dramatic” change than the obligatory chip bump to catch up with the iPad Pro. What even has this year been.

But Bloomberg boy revealed that Apple will be updating the MacBook Pro, Mac mini and iMac with the new generation chips before the end of this year, and given that iMac & MacBook Pro both got their current form factor in 2021 while the Mac mini has remained basically unchanged since 2010. Soooooooo will it be the Mac mini? Well you’d think so, wouldn’t you, and don’t get me wrong it absolutely could be. Its certainly due for some love, and we have seen some rumours over the past few years for smaller Mac mini designs, colourful designs, and even some that harked back more to the original Mac mini design which had a smaller footprint, just large enough for an optical drive with a polycarbonate lid. Like this. Just make It a bit, flatter. And when the Mac mini M1 arrived, the thing was pretty empty inside, and was still packing the 150w power supply, way overkill for an M chip, so smaller made a lot of sense. Could have been Apple TV small probably. But now we also have an M2 Pro mini, so maybe it won’t shrink so much if this really is getting the update. But maybe it’s not… Just like you’re maybe not subscribed. Which is basically discriminating against me. Fix that eh?

I don’t think it’ll be the MacBook Pro though either, we’ve heard that an OLED version is on the way for that, but probably not until next year at the earliest, so that leaves us with iMac… and maybe, just maybe the more dramatic changes are coming there.

I mean think about it, the Mac mini is what it is, changing the form factor more is probably not going to make it more functional, though if they went with a smaller maybe polycarbonate chassis maybe they could drop the base price by another $100 back to the $499 that Mac mini originally launched at way back in 2005 (so close to 20 years ago!). That would be awesome, but… nah.

iMac though… everyone’s biggest complaint since the honestly pretty awesome looking M1 iMac released has been the lack of a replacement for that glorious 27” model - yes, there’s one all set up and running here in the new iCave too. But I’ve said from the start that 24” and 27” don’t really make sense for the display sizes, they’re too similar on the desktop as far as I’m concerned so I’d assume something around 30” is most likely. And now, given that Apple seems to have moved on from its MiniLED ambitions, it may well be harder for analysts to see these in the supply chain than before. But what will power them?

I could see iMac getting the option for an M4 Pro chip but probably not Max or Ultra chips for a true iMac Pro replacement as some have hoped. AND, if that’s the case I’d also expect that option to come to both the 24” and new larger models as that’s in line with everything else we’ve seen from Apple so far, where display sizes are not a limiting factor to the chips - though they may have a binned M4 chip option in the smaller iMac with the larger model starting with a full performance M4. What Apple has done though in the recent past is a different colour option based on what chips you have inside, including the iMac which had 4 colours available for the binned 1299 M1 with three additional colours for the full on chip - so perhaps a space black option like the higher end MacBook Pros could come to the iMac? With, dare I say it… DARK BEZELS?

And when will we be seeing these? Most likely in October - Apple has a way of waiting just a little longer for the macOS public releases after the iOS, watchOS, iPadOS and tvOS typically arrives in September, and it’s also been rumoured that Apple Intelligence won’t be QUITE ready for the September event when iPhone 16 & 16 Plus, 16 Pro & 16 Pro Max will be unveiled, most likely alongside a slightly redesigned Apple Watch Series 10, a not at all redesigned Apple Watch Ultra 3 and hopefully updated iPad and iPad mini. As all of those will be getting Apple intelligence all being well including the Apple Watches, Apple will be glad of an extra opportunity to showcase the new features as it actually becomes available to the public. And as the NPU in M4 is around 3X faster than the one in M1, that event would be a pretty good event to feature Apple Intelligence.

#Apple #Mac #imacpro

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