“Apple’s Mac products, which range from thin and light notebooks all the way to powerful all-in-one desktop workstations, are powered by processors supplied by Intel,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “According to my estimates, Intel generates about $3 billion in annual revenue from sales of chips into Apple’s Macs, making up about 9% of its total client computing group revenue.”
“Over the last several months, Intel has launched or announced a wide range of processors that would allow Apple to release upgraded versions of its Mac products,” Eassa writes. “Apple sells two variants of its powerful MacBook Pro computers — one with a 13-inch display and one with a 15-inch display. Intel announced a processor family known as Coffee Lake-U earlier this year, which improves upon its predecessor by moving from a dual-core design to a quad-core design. That new quad-core Coffee Lake-U chip will likely power Apple’s upgraded 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro products use Intel’s higher-performance H-series processors. The current 15-inch MacBook Pro incorporates a chip called Kaby Lake-H, which is a quad-core design. The successor to Kaby Lake-H, known as Coffee Lake-H, is a hex-core design. So, expect the MacBook Pro to see a jump in processor core count compared to its predecessor as well. ”
“Over the last several years, Apple has regularly updated the 12-inch MacBook with new processors. The 2016 model saw an upgrade to Intel’s Skylake-Y chips and the 2017 model was upgraded with a chip called Kaby Lake-Y,” Eassa writes. “It was widely expected that the 2018 model would include a chip known as Cannon Lake-Y, but the manufacturing technology that’s used to build the Cannon Lake-Y chips is proving problematic.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s iMac and iMac Pro desktops are also discussed in the full article, but the Mac Pro and Mac mini are as ignored by Eassa as they are by Apple.
It isn’t just the processors that need upgrading. IT’s the whole way Apple thinks (doesn’t think at all) about upgrading.
Imagine the Touchbar MacBook Pro with more cores in its processor. The battery is about 20% smaller than the previous Retina MacBook Pro and battery life currently sucks on it.
Easy solution: bring back the 17” MacBook Pro. Show customers that you really do care about performance, and not just Jony’s stupid anorexic stylings.
I have posted this on MDN before. I bought the 17” MacbookPro on day one in May 2003 fully loaded for over $3,000. Absolutely wonderful machine and what I liked about it most was a portable desktop to go. If they brought it back, I would buy a new one in a heartbeat …
To be fair, the “upgrades” that Intel delivers are fairly modest from each generation to the next – most of the time.
It’s only this years that the core-count rises significantly at the higher-end.
Apple has been remarkably lazy and careless regarding Macs in recent years. BUT! The death of Moore’s Law at Intel and the resulting repeated delays in CPU releases HAVE contributed to the decline in Mac hardware upgrades. Let’s be fair.
Derek has been remarkably lazy and careless regarding Mac commentary in recent years. BUT! The death of Moore’s Law at Intel and the resulting repeated delays in CPU releases HAVE contributed to the decline in positive Mac hardware commentary from Derek. Let’s be fair.
so, anonymous hater. who are you, beside being a coward? everyone knows who i am. its easy to puke and depart. there’s some lazy and careless to revile. but i find trolls seek and enjoy being abused back again. it’s that s&m thing i’ll never understand, thankfully. enjoy, i guess: 🖕
Some of what Apple is selling as new right now is dog slow running current SW.
Really have you ever tried to outrun a dog, To be fair, most of the blame is with Apple because they have designed the new MacBook Pros with no breathing room literally, and such small batteries that they have to slow them down for both Heat and Battery life. Make em light Apple but give them a little more space and much more power.
The “pro” version of any Mac from Apple has to eschew stylings in favor of powerful function, upgrading and battery power. It’s just plain stupid to think otherwise and counter to what most of their customers want. Pro machines don’t have to be on an starvation design diet.
“Pro machines don’t have to be on an starvation design diet.” Love it! You da man, Peter …
Have a new 8 week old puppy. He tries hard, but he is still pretty slow.
A year from now he will be 70-75 lbs and waist high. Dog slow will mean something very different.
Apple seems to forget one of the values of the Mac platform . It is the center or hub for the digital lifestyle.
That hasn’t been true for quite some time. There are many, many people with iPads and Macs and Apple TV’s and HomePods and Apple Watches that don’t own a Mac.
And they are crippled in many ways…’without mac and itunes on mac… some features are handicaped.
So no f-way ipad iphone and watch are 100% stand alone..
Do some homework ” wrong Again”
Yes, they are stand alone. And I’m sorry you don’t like the facts. 🙂
Let’s just look at the numbers… if EVERY iPhone, iPad sold REQUIRED a Mac, then Mac sales should be a helluva lot stronger than they are, right? And, even if you accept that every two iPhones is sharing a single Mac, the numbers still don’t work. Every three iPhones? Still no. How about 10! Let’s assume every iPhone sold is sharing a Mac with 9 other iOS devices. Nope.
Now mental excercise, let’s not think about when you first got a computer long ago, back before the iPod and iTunes. Consider those who don’t know of a world where the iPhone didn’t exist. We’re talking about someone walking into an Apple Store today to buy an iPhone that not only doesn’t have a Mac, but may not even be familiar with “ripping” a CD (and it’s likely they’ve never bought one). BUT they DO understand Spotify, so they either bring over their Spotify app and access the music they had access to on their prior Android phone OR they decide to sign up for Apple Music.
I think part of why people have difficulty understanding “today” is that they see the world as a series of incremental events, one that built on the other such that EVERYONE needs to go through those same steps to get to “now”. In reality, what we have access to today means that a great number of those incremental steps just aren’t required anymore. It’s like believing that people HAVE to learn how to use IRC then Yahoo Messenger before getting set up with iMessage. Once you take a good realistic look at today (and maybe walk some friends through the setup process) you understand how much of the world really doesn’t require a desktop/laptop computer.
Facts are what i deal with..what you want ne to think is real. The facts that force me to go to a mac to do certain things i wont be allowed to Do strictly through iPad/iphone
Example 1…
Try to creat a song on iPad/Iphone/ios .. any app … GarageBand..etc… … then add that to a playlist on your itunes /apple music without a mac.
Or make smart playlist on ios..
I have more examples…
if u like.
But explain the above … after all u claim i dont know the facts…!
Then we can move on to other even more fundimental handicaps imposed by apple to entangle ios and macos.
Pardon my mistakes in What i meant to write
Correction…for tye beginning of my post .
I meant :
“Facts are what i deal with.. ‘NOT’ what you want ‘Me’ to “BELIEVE” is real.
🙏
Good effort, Jimbo. But unfortunately, when you are talking to a touch screen kiddie who would be totally LOST on pro computers and software, doubtful it mean anything to the clueless …
Still dumping on the Mac, I read. Well, you are Wrong Again. THE MAC is indeed the MASTER epicenter of the digital hub, the rest are portable connected gadgets. Puhleeze, get a grip …
The fastest memory available right now is LPDDR4. Anyone care to see a list of which High Powered Intel processors currently support LPDDR4? In case you were wondering why, the ONLY way you can achieve the fastest memory speeds at 32 GB is with LPDDR4. DDR4 is 30% slower (and, in mobiles, will suck your battery dry).
If you’re looking for that list, don’t. Intel isn’t currently shipping a High Powered processor that can utilize LPDDR4.
And, for those who LIKE to know stuff, here’s a good article on how Intel has missed the goal year after year after year. It also provides a view as to what limitations other companies are forced to accept by shipping a mobile machine with DESKTOP memory.
https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/
Only technical idiots or Wintel trolls would argue Apple inferiority, without also noting that Winters suffer the same problems.
Don’t try to educate them Wrong Again, they aren’t interested in facts.
The fact is that Intel’s processors have been missing the needed spec mark since 2014, and improvement in the future doesn’t look good. Could this be behind Apple’s baby steps in making iOS apps recompileable to run on MacOS? Federighi says MacOS and iOS aren’t going to merge, I believe him. But that doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t planning to move from Intel to a variant of the A-Series chip (M-Series anyone?) that can handle 32 GB (or more) LPDDR4 memory, WITH FASTER CLOCK SPEEDS AND MORE CORES from a 7nm finfet fab.
I hope that’s not too fast an upgrade for most people. I guess I should put a sarcasm tag on that, /shjtt (satire, humor, joke, tall tale).
They should focus on the Pro-Users this time. An uncompromising MacPro is missing. There other Macs are fine. A little speed bump here and there is always welcome. But for the real pro users should be released an entirely new Mac Pro. This would shine on the entire list of Macs.
I’m from Missouri on this . . .
Me too, SHOW ME ..,
Only 3-5 years late. If Apple doesn’t hit it out ot the park, the decline i Apple prestige will accelerate. Good luck trying to charge a 50% plus premium just because of an Apple logo. Mac hardware across the board is an embarrassment right now.
They won’t hit it out of the park…. well I guess it depends on the Park. 🙂
Long time Apple professionals have some expectations based on when the desktop computer and then the laptop was what most people needed for computing tasks. Those expectations haven’t been met in all these years and there’s little reason (unless you’re in the business of making excuses for Apple) to believe they’re going to suddenly meet those folk’s needs now. Let’s say THAT park’s outer wall is at around 1000 feet. In other words, Apple hasn’t a chance in heck of hitting it out of the park with them.
Newer Apple professionals are defined by Apple as being roughly 15% of ALL their users (folks that use professional apps several times in a month). 80% of those people are satisfied with one of Apple’s mobile offerings, so they care a LOT less about expandability. Because of this, that brings the wall of that part in to around…. 300 feet. We’ll have to wait and see which park they hit it out of.
Hey brainless, I’ve told you this before NOT to speak for me and MILLIONS OF MacPro Professionals. You can go back to Mom’s basement now and DELUDE yourself with touch devices and PRETENDING to be a professional. Oh wait, your’re NOT! …
TOTAL “embarrassment” like we have never seen before …
I hope they come up with a dongle just for the Touch Bar. And I hope they price it way high.
Retitle:
Apple’s entire Mac lineup MUST get upgrades this year! DAMMIT!