Here are some safe bets to make about Apple in 2017. We’ll see new iPads in the spring. They’re overdue. We’ll see some new iMacs this year. They’re overdue. See the pattern?
Late spring will see Apple’s annual World Wide Developer’s Conference which will bring new versions of macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, as usual, but what many of us want is more hardware. For a hardware company, Apple sure seems behind the times these days. Take the new MacBook Pro. Puhleeze.
The New New Mac
Nattering nabobs of negativism and members of the technorati elite politburo be damned, the new MacBook Pro is a screamer. Yes, it has only 16GB of RAM. Yes, it has a modest speed bump CPU. Yes, the Touch Bar is actually a useful addition blended with colorful gimmickry. And, yes, Apple has something else planned for the MacBook Pro in 2017.
Can you say Kaby Lake? That’s the name of the new line of smaller, faster CPU’s from Intel; chips that did not make it into production fast enough for the late 2016 MacBook Pro line. Well, guess what? Noted analyst and crystal ball soothsayer Ming-Chi Kuo says new Mac notebooks with new Kaby Lake CPU’s from Intel are on the way.
To be fair about prognosticating, this one is a no brainer. Everyone has been waiting for the Kaby Lake upgrade and now they’re in the pipeline and have shown up on a few Windows PC makers, so it’s a safe bet they’ll show up as Intel Inside a MacBook Pro. In 2017. Just in time to make you feel very foolish for not waiting. Just in time for Mac die hards to storm the gates of Cupertino and burn CEO Tim Cook in effigy.
Kuo also thinks Apple will have a 15-inch MacBook Pro with a 32GB option, perhaps available in late summer. Apple could do it sooner, of course, maybe even at WWDC 2017, but the gates at Apple’s Cupertino HQ need to be reinforced. All of this is just speculation, of course, but that’s pretty much everything that revolves around Apple. Speculation.
Years ago I bought the first aluminum MacBook as a road machine, only to see Apple introduce yet another, faster, cooler, aluminum MacBook just months later. The same thing happened to an iPad a few years ago. A new model was launched, only to be superseded but yet another new and better model a few months later. Is Apple becoming “out with the old and in with the new?” Of course not. We’re coming up on four years since the original cylinder trash can Mac Pro model was introduced in 2013 and that model hasn’t seen an upgrade in anything ever. Except to macOS Sierra and previous macOS versions, of course.
Everyone likes it when Apple introduces new products. Apple watchers like it. Apple customers like it. Apple’s critics like it. Even Apple’s competitors like it because with every new Apple product or model upgrade they have something to copy and less need to devote money to R&D. As to new new MacBook Pro models with the faster and power sipping Kaby Lake CPU’s, let ’em come, Apple. I don’t mind buying something new with Apple Pay, but I might have an opinion to express if there’s something new new coming right after something new.
