Apple’s 2022 Deadlines
Apple (November 2020):
This is the beginning of a transition to a new family of chips designed specifically for the Mac. The transition to Apple silicon will take about two years to complete, and these three systems are an amazing first step.
Within a year of the company’s first Apple silicon Macs being released, almost the entire product line had been moved over; the company even released a new model, the Mac Studio, with some uber-powerful chip configurations to boot.
But as 2022 runs out the clock, there are a few Intel laggards still in the pack. The Mac mini has moved over to the M1, yes, but a higher-end Intel model still remains for sale. More significantly, the company’s most powerful machine, the Mac Pro, is still nowhere to be seen, aside from a vague hint during the Mac Studio announcement in spring of this year.
I haven’t seen any rumors about the 27-inch iMac or the iMac Pro. At this point I assume they’re dead. For the Mac Pro and Mac mini, I think people will forgive the Apple Silicon transition taking a bit longer to complete, considering all that’s going on in the world and that the transition of the more popular Macs has been pretty much a home run.
So it’s likewise a little surprising that another new product from the company that was due to appear in 2022 doesn’t seem like it’ll make the date either: Apple Classical.
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But here’s the thing about Apple: the company doesn’t usually like to make future predictions unless it is ridiculously certain of hitting its mark.
The OCSP preference is also overdue.
Previously:
- Apple Reneged on OCSP Privacy
- Studio Display
- Apple Acquires Primephonic
- One More Thing: Apple Silicon Macs
- Mac Pro Available to Order
Update (2022-12-14): Jason Snell:
If you paid attention to analyst and press reports, though, it sure seems like Apple is six to nine months behind where it had expected to be. The M2 MacBook Air, which was announced in June and shipped in July (and which I did predict, for the record!), was originally rumored to ship last fall. Whether or not Apple planned on selling it that early, it sure seems the company didn’t expect to have to wait until summer to get it out the door.
I’ll save my predictions for a column later this month, but I think it’s perhaps safe to expect that 2023 will finally be the year that Apple shows Intel the door.
Update (2022-12-16): Chance Miller:
There are a couple of areas of interest in the Mac lineup right now. There’s no big-screen iMac powered by Apple Silicon, and Apple also isn’t selling the old Intel-powered big-screen iMac. Instead, your only iMac option is the 24-inch iMac with the M1 chip inside.
Interestingly, Apple also continues to sell a version of the Mac mini with Intel inside. This machine is likely to be discontinued at some point in the near future, but it’s likely still a popular option for some enterprise buyers.
[…]
Apple missed its two-year target for completing the Apple Silicon, but does it really matter? No, it doesn’t. What we’ve seen for the Apple Silicon transition so far has been nothing short of impressive, and the transition shouldn’t be viewed as a “failure” because of one of the lack of an Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
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Abandoning the 27 inch iMac is such a misfire. It was the perfect in-between computer.
> Abandoning the 27 inch iMac is such a misfire. It was the perfect in-between computer.
The 27” iMac was a good deal for a 5K display, and it’s not clear why they axed it. Panel availability maybe?
That said, the idea of bonding the computer to the display has always bothered me. The display will surely outlast the useful lifespan of the computer, so it seems wasteful, and probably more expensive in the long run.
Look at the 2015 5K iMac: the internals are effectively obsolete, but it’s a perfectly good display 7 years on (perhaps an indictment of the display industry, but that’s a separate issue). Or consider the Dell U2410: I used one as my primary display for 6 years, across several Macs, PCs, and game consoles. It’s low resolution by today’s standards, but is an IPS display with a wide color gamut and 10-bit internal processing; 13 years on I still find uses for it.
With the current M1 lineup, the iMac no longer carries a performance advantage over the Mac mini, but opting for the Mac mini meaning running two extra cables (Thunderbolt and display power), and for a decent display you’ll end up paying more up front.
Likewise, I feel like the Mac Studio + Studio Display is the intended replacement for the iMac Pro. The iMac Pro always felt like a stopgap given the dire state of the Mac Pro in 2017/2018. It made even less sense to me than the consumer iMac given its price and the likelihood that pro users would want to upgrade to the latest hardware after a couple of years.
The biggest issue continues to be a lack of good, affordable external displays.
"The display will surely outlast the useful lifespan of the computer, so it seems wasteful, and probably more expensive in the long run."
I think both parts continue to be valuable, but for different things. The display panel will obviously remain valuable as a display panel, but the computer itself also remains valuable, just not as a desktop PC. But you could still use it as a file server, turn it into a router, connect it to a TV to run VLC, or hundreds of other things.
But only if it isn't glued to a display.
Leaving the Intel-based Mac Mini available is useful: developers will need to test on Intel for a few more years.
Most likely doesn’t suggest anything but “the kernel must scale from a small, power-efficient system like Apple Watch to a performance-focused Mac Studio with 128 GB of RAM” with no mention of Mac Pro surprised me.
https://security.apple.com/blog/towards-the-next-generation-of-xnu-memory-safety/
