“Even though Apple’s first major hardware launches for 2016 are probably still months away, rumors of the company’s roadmap are already widespread, including some potential shakeups for products like the iPhone,” Roger Fingas reports for AppleInsider.
“Apple is of course working on its next-generation flagship iPhones, presumably to be called the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. One rumor is that the devices will be fully waterproof, building on the partial water protection of the iPhone 6s. Apple may also switch away from a fully-metallic chassis, possibly integrating the cellular antenna in the process,” Fingas reports. “The new models may be so thin that Apple is considering removing the 3.5mm headphone jack, which would limit people to using Bluetooth or Lightning connections for headphones and speakers.”
“The iMac, MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro should all see upgrades to Intel’s latest processors, and in other areas where needed, such as support for standards like USB-C — currently only on the 12-inch Retina MacBook,” Fingas reports. “One mystery is whether Apple will deign to update the Mac mini or the Mac Pro. Both machines were neglected in 2015, and the latter hasn’t been updated since the first cylindrical model shipped two years ago.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bring on the next-hen MacBook. That’s the one we hope are destined for our backpacks.
Please please PLEASE a new Mac Pro with sufficient upgrades that won’t make me have to consider (yech!) a PC workstation for my high end VFX/4K Editing and graphics needs. “This is my most desperate hour Obi-Apple, you’re my only hope.”
Lower prices couldn’t hurt either. But I know that won’t happen.
I think this focus on radical new paradigm busting disruptive products introduced each year kind of ridiculous. Should we castigate the computer industry for relying on computer sales for the last 20 years? The devices we use will continue to go on and make money. Smaller device items like Apple Watch will help to prop up profits. What’s wrong with that? There’s a limit as to how many types of devices the market even needs so it’s not just Apple but EVERYONE in tech who stands or falls. Apple cars maybe will also fill in the gap. But personally I don’t think the situation is as dire as these doofus anal-cysts pretend since Apple has another 70-80% of the market left in phones, computers and other devices to sell to. The doom ‘n gloom predictions are really for Android manufacturers playing to a near zero sum profit game. Apple’s in good shape. Could they be better? Yes in many respects but they still are Number One in what they do. Alternatives in my opinion look much grimmer.
Well life’s too short to debate every point you make. There’s always room for improvement and similar lists could be compiled for Samsung, Google and Microsoft. My money is still on Apple. And Wall Street “exasperates itself.” Christmas quarter financial announcements will show this. So we shall see. But yes with all their money there’s no reason not to have near perfect execution in all departments.
Money doesn’t make things magically happen. These are still human beings and, yes, they do tend to make mistakes sometimes. A lot of people love to blame Tim cook for everything, however, the Apple Steve Jobs handed to Tim Cook WAS not ready for the growth they experienced and we’re all witnessing the outcome of that. Tim Cook is attempting to restructure Apple so it can cope with it and prepare it for much, much more growth in the future.
Anyone who fails to see that, is just ignorant – blinded by some juvenile hatred for Tim.
Spot on Michael. To be honest I lost interest in BI’s rant after he magically contradicted himself with one moment claiming Apple wasn’t producing new products and milking ‘cash cows’ and then with no irony on display whatsoever, claims they are producing too many products as a sign off. I have yet to hear one of these detractors suggest a new (sane) product or an area ripe for exploitation that Cook et al are blatantly ignoring. This like so many of them shows that he isn’t interested in the veracity of the content but rather about exercising his Napoleon syndrome in blathering one dimensional rants.
Quit with the copy-and-paste nonsense, anonymous troll. We have seen you post the same content far too many times. Certainly there is room for improvement in Apple and its products. But the situation is not nearly as gloomy as you paint the picture. Any other company would be glad to switch places with Apple, and Apple’s future looks quite promising to me and many, many others.
Enjoy your pessimism. It seems like a way of life for you.
Business Insider? About the worst track record for accuracy, and one of the worst click-bait operations on the web. I don’t know if you have anything to do with them, but certainly your foolish ramblings fit the bill completely.
It seems AAPL is lagging on innovation right now. They need a new mass appeal product. But with APPLE you just don’t have any clear idea what they are up to in the way of new innovation or products for that matter. Tim has done a great job at managing the company. Johnny Ives is there.. But again without Steve riding his ass and challenging him to ‘do it better’ I submit that design and innovation could be slowing down. Just my opinion of course. I am long AAPL.
-Could Apple and Tesla hook up?-
I hope Apple doesn’t mandate Bluetooth headphones by removing headphone jacks. The Bluetooth bandwidth continues to be a joke for audio transmission. Gawd knows why! Bluetooth was originally created for audio! But Bluetooth is still incapable of decent audio quality. 😛
Using a Lightning connector is another matter. That merely makes me say ‘Hmm’.
“Bring on the next-hen MacBook.”
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Next-hen? I certainly hope Apple doesn’t lay an egg….:o)
Okay, “Next – Gen” Please fix your spellchecker, MDN.
MDN laid an egg. Please add spellchecking functions to your favorite web page developer program for 2016 so we can edit our keyboard goofs in Comments after posting the first time.
You can’t expect MDN to strive for excellence like the company that they are reporting on does. They are just ordinary Americans who got a 9 to 5 job and a paycheque. You are expecting them to actually care? They make at least 52 blunders a year on this website but the biggest blunder, in my humble opinion, is to keep putting up completely irrelevant ads and hoping people will accidentally click on them.
PLEASE. No new products in 2016. Fix what you’ve got!! We had 6 new products come out in 2015. We have half baked music, half baked watch, half baked iPad pro, half baked iOS multitasking. Still have longstanding and embarrassing bugs in OS X. Apple is lacking focus lately, which was one of its strongest points a few years ago. At this point I’m hoping – practically begging- no new products in 2016! Spend some time making the products better.
Let me clarify this statement a little bit. Apple’s hardware is top notch. Everything looks and performs well. What we need is better software. We had an Apple TV with App Store come out. But no clear, defining example of what a great tv app is. iPad Pro came out. It’s pretty amazing. But no shining example of what a professional iPad app should be. Countless bugs in watchOS, tvOS, and Apple Music. The software team needs to step up and improve the experiences of these products.
It feels like all of these products are SO close to being great. 75% of the time they are wonderful. But then there are moments where it feels almost impossible that these products shipped with the software issues in place. I just want the “it just works” mantra of Apple past to continue. Let’s see some meaningful software updates, new apps, and great experiences. Beautiful and powerful hardware is useless without great software with which to do amazing things on the hardware.
Apple is in the middle of a transition, switching all their code to Swift. Expect to see more bugs until they’re finished, then we should start to see much more stable and bug-free software from them.
Swift actually has nothing to do with it. I use Swift. It actually creates far less buggy programs. The issue here is lack of focused. Apple is trying to do to much and they’re removing engineers to new projects to do it. They have incredibly small teams working on large projects. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as your quality doesn’t suffer. Apple’s quality is clearly suffering. They need to hire more talent, instead of just shuffling it around while important products get neglected.
Forgive all the typos. Was still half-asleep when I wrote that.
Also, note that most dev teams inside Apple are NOT using Swift yet. The Application Binary Interface isn’t even nailed down yet, and fundamental aspects of the language are still being solidified. Swift won’t be heavily adopted by Apple for a majority of software dev projects until Swift 3.0 or later is released, late this year.
Swift only just went open source, and is still very much in its infancy. It is powerful and robust, but is still in constant evolution. Re-writing big projects in Swift at this time would be a waste, as the language will undoubtedly be changing in fundamental ways over the next 1-2 years.
I just gave up on Photos in OSX after trying to make it work for the past several weeks. I had iCloud Photo Library turned off, but My Photo Stream turned on so I could save new photos from my iPhone to my Macbook automatically. It turns out that not all of my photos were syncing and syncs would randomly stop working.
Being stressed that not all of my photos are there (particularly when many are of documents critical to my grad school research) is not worth it. I deleted all of my photos from the app and am manually backing them up to an external drive as before.
Simple things like not being able to chronologically view my photos in the “all photos” folder is maddening. Perhaps there is a way to do this, but the interface is so convoluted and unintuitive that it’s not worth investing the time to learn. Simple, organized folders and knowing that all of my photos are there far outweigh anything Photos has to offer.
A ‘next-hen’ MacBook??? Is this for use in chicken coops? Or is it a free range MacBook that eats only bugs and organic grain?
That said, I would love to see a 24 inch Retina iMac.
Backpacks? Really
Read this and understand why Thunderbolt 3 will change everything . . .
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/intel-talks-thunderbolt-3
I hope Apple comes out with a new desktop option. For anyone who already has a display but wants more than a mini (but less than the Mac Pro), Apple currently offers no solution (and hasn’t for several years). There are a lot of older iMacs that need replacing, but that still have perfectly fine displays. With an inability to easily upgrade hard drives and RAM, they face obsolescence much faster than before. Even if they’re recyclable, it’s still an environmental waste, since we all know that many will still end up in landfills, and recycling isn’t free, either.
I hope they bring back the headless desktop configurable for higher-end use, with an appropriate price point (along with a new Thunderbolt Display). The Mac Pro and Mac mini are too niche, each in their own way.
I think they’ve run the numbers many times and doing what you suggest isn’t profitable enough and therefore not worth it. Computing is so mobile now that it makes more sense to have a macbook pro and connect it to your display.