Apple quashes iMac refresh rumor
Our favorite fruit company has gone out of its way to dampen any expectation that anything else new will be announced this year.
All of those hopeful rumors about a revised Mac mini arriving before Christmas? Just so much rubbish.
Holding out for an updated iMac built around nVidia’s hot new discreet graphics solution? You’ll need to hold your breath until at least Macworld in San Francisco next year.
Quoting a statement from Apple, Macworld reports that Apple won’t be updating any more products this year.
“Our holiday line-up is set,” Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld.
Recent days have seen a flurry of rumors spring up around the Mac mini, iMac and Mac Pro — the three Apple product lines that haven’t been updated in recent months.
In the case of the Mac mini, the last update was rolled out on Aug. 7 of 2007 — about 15 months ago. Even at the time of the refresh, the internals of Apple’s least expensive desktop computer were woefully out-of-date and that state of affairs has only grown more egregious with the passing seasons.
However, Apple did release a completely updated iMac earlier this year with the product’s visual design becoming the template for the just-updated MacBook and MacBook Pro.
Last but far from least, the Mac Pro was updated just ahead of this year’s Macworld San Francisco.
Frozen sales
As a collective whimper issues from the Mac blogsphere, we should perhaps pause a moment to mourn our dashed hopes and think about Apple’s motivation for issuing a statement that no further updates are forthcoming this year.
The bottom line has to be that expectations of a product refresh had stifled sales. Given Apple’s strict policy against speaking with the public about new products and release schedules, which they’ve implicitly done here, there’s really no other reason for the company to issue a statement now.
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November 4th, 2008
Surely it would be ill advised of Apple to plunge and update its iMacs now. They won a Black Pencil award for design, and their interiors are not too bad. They could do with faster quad core processors and a faster front side bus and a better graphics card, but maybe we’d be best off waiting a little longer: the new core i7 processor is currently in the process of being introduced, and who’s to say Apple aren’t working on an iteration of that to implement in their iMacs? Besides, iMacs do what you need them to do because they have a much better OS.
The Mac Minis need updating, but I would suggest that instead of quite such a small form factor Apple should go for a slightly larger design that is in the same vein as the home media centre PCs that can sit near a PC. They are quite stylish, Apple could put their own spin on it and it gives a bit more room for components and means components don’t have to be scaled down quite so much.
Just a thought.