“Apple is between a rock and a hard place and it’s all Intel’s fault,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “When the first Macs with Intel Inside appeared in 2006, it was a revelation. Performance improved at a good clip, and the teething problems were few. The worst issue for most was the tendency for those first MacBook Pro notebooks to run too hot.”
“Unfortunately, Intel’s development schedule has hit roadblocks, and the Broadwell chips are running extremely late. Some low-power versions were slated to ship this summer, but the ones that Apple uses may not come out until the end of the year, or early next year. This pushes major Mac speed bumps to 2015, but Apple shouldn’t be expected to wait,” Steinberg writes. “Their solution was to take slightly faster chips from the Haswell family and issue minor refreshes for the MacBook Air and the MacBook pro families. The former also benefitted from $100 price cuts. With the MacBook Pro, Apple’s plan was to double installed memory on most configurations, and only reduce the price of the high-end 15-inch MacBook Pro configuration, which already had 16GB installed.”
“Benchmarks of the new versus the old show slight improvements, but you’d need a stopwatch to demonstrate the faster speeds for most functions,” Steinberg writes. “By offering more value for your money, though, Apple has succeeded in growing the Mac platform at a faster rate than other hardware, even the iPhone. So sales increased by 18% in the June quarter…”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Apple’s new MacBook Pro performance benchmarks – July 30, 2014
Is Apple’s now even less expensive non-Retina MacBook Pro worth buying? – July 29, 2014
Apple updates MacBook Pro with faster Haswell processors, increased base RAM; cuts price of non-Retina model – July 29, 2014