Linked List: June 14, 2018

Thursday, 14 June 2018

On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware 

Quentin Carnicelli:

At the time of the writing, with the exception of the $5,000 iMac Pro, no Macintosh has been updated at all in the past year. […]

Rather than attempting to wow the world with “innovative” new designs like the failed Mac Pro, Apple could and should simply provide updates and speed bumps to the entire lineup on a much more frequent basis. The much smaller Apple of the mid-2000s managed this with ease. Their current failure to keep the Mac lineup fresh, even as they approach a trillion dollar market cap, is both baffling and frightening to anyone who depends on the platform for their livelihood.

Compare and contrast with the iPhone, which is updated not just annually, but predictably. Post-WWDC, I’ve had a few friends and readers ask whether they should just go ahead and buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro now — knowing they’re old, knowing the keyboards are of questionable reliability — or wait until fall. I have no idea if new MacBooks are coming in the fall though. It certainly seems like they should, but would you really be surprised if we don’t see new MacBooks (and iMacs) until 2019?

I’d really love to see Apple get Mac hardware on a roughly annual schedule, even if most years they’re just speed bumps, like they were a decade ago.

A Brief Moment of Honesty 

Donald Trump, in Singapore, asked whether he believes Kim Jong-un will actually destroy a nuclear site and return American POW remains:

“Honestly, I think he’s going to do these things. I may be wrong, I mean I may stand before you in six months and say, hey, I was wrong — I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”

That’s the most honest thing he has said as president.

Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It’s No Longer Mini 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors back in March:

The Mac mini was last updated 1245 days ago, in October of 2014. (And that was a lackluster upgrade.) Taking a cue from my dreams about what a modern Mac mini might be like, I bought a tiny Intel NUC PC and installed macOS on it. My Mac mini was becoming unreliable and I was hoping to experiment with Intel’s hardware in advance of a real Mac mini being released.

This was intended to be a temporary experiment. And, in fact, I hope to replace the NUC with a real Mac mini just as soon as Apple finally releases that all-new Mac mini that’s hopefully percolating inside Cupertino. But in the meantime, I have been running macOS on non-Apple hardware, and it’s been an instructive experience.

Cheaper and faster, but a pain in the ass to keep updated software-wise. All of that is to be expected. But the striking thing to me is just how much smaller the Intel NUC is. It’s only a little bit bigger than an Apple TV. Calling the Mac Mini “mini” is absurd in 2018.

I wrote about this last September, when the Apple TV 4K came out:

Apple TV 4K is tiny compared to a Mac Mini, but judging by Geekbench scores (Mac Mini; iPad Pro, which uses the A10X in the Apple TV) it’s a slightly faster computer than even the maxed-out Mac Mini configuration. Apple TV 4K probably has better GPU performance too. In addition to all the performance problems stemming from the fact that the Mac Mini hasn’t been updated in three years, it’s also inarguable that it’s no longer even “mini”. You could arrange four Apple TV units in a 2 × 2 square and they’d take up the same volume as one Mac Mini.

Apple TV proves that Apple can make an amazing compact puck-sized computer. They just seem to have lost any interest in making one that runs MacOS.