For Apple Enterprise customers, 2016 has been a quiet affair. Events in the spring and summer have been and gone without any major updates to the Mac line up. So, is a boring 2016 about to become interesting?
The MacBook Pro is Apple’s flagship laptop. Whether it be the 13 or 15”, it is the go to machine for Mac professionals. Rumours were circulating prior to WWDC that the MacBook Pro was about to be refreshed but it looks like it will be later on this year that we will be treated to a new model.
Expect the new model to be thinner and lighter and to incorporate an OLED display touch bar to replace the physical function keys. The most recent of rumours suggest that the OLED display may be contextual and actually change between apps. We would also expect to see Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C ports on these machines.
Apple recently announced that stocks of the ageing 27” Thunderbolt display will not be replenished. As with anything Apple, this has resulted in a great deal of speculation. Some claim that this means that Apple will be leaving the whole external display market all together.
We are not so convinced. With a 5K Retina Display on the iMac it seems logical that Apple have the ability and technology to produce an external display that would complement the whole Mac range. In addition, the iMac display utilises P3 and this goes well beyond the standard sRGB spectrum. Apple claim that P3 brings 25% more colour and has achieved it by swapping white LEDs for advanced red green phosphor LEDs.
Some of the more exciting rumours focus on the new display having its own GPU which would mean that less powerful Macs, such as the MacBook, would be able to complete more graphic intensive tasks than the on board graphics would allow. It would also be cool if Apple gave a number of GPU’s to choose from so that you could select the right display for your budget and tasks.
With this in mind we feel that a new external display could be with us before the year is out.
As for iMacs we only anticipate a speed bump in performance, the usual processor and graphics improvements. As for the Mac mini and Mac Pro it is very hard to determine. Everybody got excited when code was discovered in El Capitan that suggested a new Mac Pro was imminent but as of yet nothing has materialised.
As for the MacBook Air, we wouldn’t be surprised if it falls out of the line-up this year. Apple has so many products within the 11-13” size that we feel a tidy up is required.
So as we enter the second half of the year we are hoping that Apple focus on the Mac line-up and give our enterprise customers something to get excited about.