Apple has certainly been busy over the past few months, with the roll out of the 3G iPhone and improved iPhone software along with the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. But it feels like the company is neglecting its bread and butter computer hardware business. Dan Knight over at the Low End Mac web site confirmed my feeling in a post yesterday called “MacDrought: 4 Months with No New Macs” (caught it via MacSurfer). As Dan notes, the Mac mini has not been updated in almost 13 months, the Mac Pro and Macbook Air in almost 9 months, and Macbooks and Macbook Pros in 6 months. The iMac did get some speedbump upgrades just 4 months ago.
All of the lines could use a refresh. Lenovo recently announced some pretty juicy upgrades to its Macbook Air challenger, the X300, adding a bigger drive, faster CPUs and bumping the model number up one to X301. The Macbook Air needs more storage space and/or a firewire port pronto. The Mac Mini is just dying, with ancient graphics and CPU technology. The Macbook Pro line is lagging the entire rest of the high-end PC laptop market which has moved to Intel’s latest four-core mobile CPUs. Both the Macbook and the Macbook Pro are also hanging on to an aging external design which, rumor has it, won’t be with us too much longer.
And that’s the hopeful bit of Knight’s post. He posits a likely update schedule over the next few months that would see most of the line refreshed. I don’t agree that Apple will be phasing out optical drives from desktop Macs but it’s about time for a major reboot.
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