Apple just concluded their ‘See You on the 7th’ media event, and although it’s clearly for the new iPhone 7, and perhaps Apple Watch too, some of us were hoping to get news about refreshed Mac notebooks. Well, to cut to the chase, nothing was heard about upcoming notebooks. Apple did announce macOS release will be on 20th September.
The speculation is still for new Mac notebooks to arrive later this year. Many Mac users are looking forward to some hardware refreshed, because they are now seriously outdated.
The last update of the Retina MacBook Pro was in early 2015 for the 13-inch model, and mid 2015 for the 15-inch model. That’s considerably old compared to the average time between refreshes in the past. Furthermore, the basic specifications of the Retina MacBook Pro has, in fact, been around since late 2013.
The MacBook Air was last updated in March 2015.
The latest line of Mac notebooks, the 12-inch MacBook, received a minor processor update in April this year. But it’s otherwise about the same as its original launched in April 2015.
The rest of the Mac hardware, the non-notebook ones, are far worse. The iMac itself isn’t so bad, being updated in October 2015, but the Mac Mini was last refreshed in October 2014, Mac Pro in December 2013, and Apple should probably just stop selling the non-Retina MacBook Pro, which has been unchanged since June 2012. Yes, it’s over four years old now.
Some of us speculate that Apple might want to push Mac users toward the iPad Pro. But it’s just not the same. Windows notebook users might consider the Surface Pro 4, because it really still is a Windows notebook, while being a really cool tablet at the same time. The iPad Pro isn’t a substitute for a Mac notebook in any way.
While the September Apple event is always about iPhones, it they could have alluded to some new releases. We’ll now have to wait a little longer, to another event expected in October.
Meanwhile, macOS’ arrival later this month could keep Mac users a little busy. Or not. There doesn’t seem to be that much exciting things going for the new OS. Let’s see:
- Name changed from OS X to macOS
- Siri is coming
- Buch of cloudy stuffs
- A cool new filesystem, but oh wait, it’s only coming later
We could get a little excited over the cool new Apple File System, APFS. But you see, Apple is only telling us that it is coming later to macOS, but not in the initial release. It probably can’t be used as a startup drive (i.e. not bootable). Quite likely, APFS will only be properly ready in the next major update of OS X, or rather, macOS as it is now called.
To talk about a new feature, that’s not even going to be in the upcoming OS release, seems to say that Apple hasn’t got much to talk about macOS.
Let’s just hope Apple has something really exciting coming in October.