News - iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook Air 2011 refresh

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iMac:


Hey, guys! Steven here with MacTD. If you are looking to get an iMac at the moment, do not get one just yet. And if you have already purchased one within the last 30 days, go back to Apple and return it. This is because we are most likely going to be expecting an iMac refresh coming at the end April or start of May.

Now the iMac's were last updated in July last year so we are nearing the cycle of when the product will undergo an update. Based on the recent trends whereby whenever a refresh is just around the corner we will see limit in supplies for that product. This is because apple is letting it's old stocks dwindle so that they can provide the new updated stocks to the it's suppliers once it becomes available. The iMac stocks in alot of the apple online european stores are now classified as "constrained", and they have also said that they won't be expecting new stocks to arrive until the 27th April. So could this be the arrival date of the new iMacs?

So what could be expect from the new iMacs? Well, if the new MacBook Pro's are of any good indication then we could see the new Intel Sandy bridge processors such as the i3's, i5's and i7's. So just faster and more powerful CPU's. Also, we are most likely going to get the addition of the thunderbolt port and probably an HD facetime camera. We might get the AMD radeon graphics card, and maybe more RAM support or even more RAM as a standard. We could get the option for a solid state drive to replace the traditional hard drive, but personally I don't think that will happen just yet. Lastly, we could see the baseline 21.5 inch model scrapped in favour of a 24 inch being the baseline and the 30 inch being the higher end model, but again I don't think that apple would implement any major exterior designs or screen resolution changes for this refresh.

Let us know what you think on this.

Mac Pro:


Second thing I would like to talk about are the rumors of a new Mac Pro refresh coming this year. Now the Mac Pro's haven't been updated in over a year, and the design itself hasn't been updated in 8 years, although it continually had under-the-hood improvements to it's CPU's, hard drives, and graphics card. You might even think that Apple has focussed so heavily on it's iOS and portable devices that it has forgotten about its' biggest desktop computer. Well, now there have been rumors circulating about how we are going to see a re-design of the Mac Pros this year. More specifically, we could see a thinner and slimmer Mac Pro, maybe down to 5 inch in width from the previous 8 inch.

Being thinner means that it would be more mountable, and stackable. What this also means is that we could see some changes to the interior design to accommodate for this because currently the hard-drives in the Mac Pros are four across which does take up alot of width space.

So other changes we could expect are the inclusion of a thunderbolt port which would make sense in this case as the Mac Pros are a very CPU intensive machine, so having that fast data transfer speed to accompany the processing power means that you don't get any bottlenecks when transferring large amounts of files and data. In addition, we could most likely see an upgrade to the new Intel Sandy bridge processors, as the current Mac Pros use the previous generation Intel 'Westmere' and 'Nehalem' processors. And also maybe a bump up in GPU performances.

Now the actual release date is still unconfirmed. Some think that it might be release at the same time as the new iMacs but I personally think that it would be too soon. Maybe it come out as the same time as the release of the new Final Cut Pro, due in June. We'll see about that. I'll keep you posted about it as it comes along.

MacBook Air:

The last thing I would like to talk about are the expect MacBook Air refreshes for this year. Now there are some strong rumors saying that the new MacBook Airs will be going into mass production in May, so next month, for a official release date in June, so around the same time as the Mac Pros. Now it is unlikely that Apple releases a refresh of more than one of its products around the same date, as it would just dilute the demand and popularity.

What we could be getting for the new MacBook Air refreshes are faster, more powerful processors, so again the new Intel Sandy Bridge processors, or maybe ven a hint of the next generation of Intel processors, "Ivy" bridge. We could see an improvement in the graphics card, but somehow I think that the NVIDIA graphics card might still remain with this refresh. But will just have to wait and see.

Another thing is that Apple could put in a thunderbolt port to replace the display port, which would make sense seeing how Apple is trying to ramp up support for this thunderbolt technology.

And finally, we might be seeing some faster solid state drives being installed into the machine. If you haven't heard, there have been rumors that some of the recently sold MacBook Airs have got the new Samsung SSD in them, as oppose to the older Toshiba SSDs which Apple has used traditionally. There is quite improvement with the Samsung SSD compared to the Toshiba ones, so that is something that Apple might include in it's new refresh.

So there you have it. So just to summarise all that, if you are looking to get an iMac do not buy as yet, and if you have already bought one within the last 30 days go back and return it, because an iMac refresh is just 1 or 2 weeks away, end of April or early May. We could be seeing a re-design Mac Pro at around June or July and the new MacBook Airs around June. I will keep you posted once I hear more about it. I also interested to hear your comments on this and what you think. Feel free to rate and leave a comment down below. I will post a video about the new iMacs as soon as it's released so make sure to subscribe so you get posted on when that happens. Thank you for watching and I will see you guys next time!