Kenny Hemphill
We can no longer judge when Apple will update its Macs, so is it really wise to put off a purchase until Apple unveils its next-generation machines?
It’s been six months since Apple last launched a new Mac and you can see evidence of withdrawal symptoms all around the MacUser office. The art department has been denied a shiny new machine to put on the front cover, our Labs team has had to keep its Mac benchmarking tools on ice, and I’ve had no new toys to play with, errm, review.
While the announcement of the iPad in January was certainly exciting – and there’s no doubt it will be every bit as important a product for Apple as the iPod and iPhone – it doesn’t provide the same opportunity for poring over spec sheets and debating the finer points of whether Apple was right to introduce yet another type of video connector, or whether it should have by now introduced eSata interfaces across the range.
Putting together the Mac Range spread for this issue – something that will be a permanent fixture and is a definitive guide to all Apple’s desktop and notebook Macs – didn’t help much. It merely served as a reminder of just how long it has been since a brand new Mac arrived in the MacUser office.
In days gone by, it was relatively straightforward to predict when Apple would launch new machines. It used to attend three Mac shows every year: one in San Francisco in January, one in Boston or New York in July, and one in Paris in September. Each featured a Steve Jobs keynote and in at least two of those speeches, you could confidently expect the announcement of a new Mac. On top of that there were industry-specific trade shows such as the Seybold Seminars for publishing and NAB for video, and if these happened to coincide with a new machine being ready for launch, they would occasionally be the scene of an announcement. Not any more.
These days, most new launches are accompanied by nothing more ceremonial than a press release and the closing of the online Apple Store for a few hours on a Tuesday lunchtime. That in itself has become something of a circus – completely unnecessary, yet Apple persists with it because it provides loads of free viral publicity.
The apparently random timing of new Mac releases makes it that much more difficult for anyone who decides that now, or some time in the near future, is the time to upgrade their ageing Mac. You used to be able to judge with some confidence how long it would be before the machine you were considering buying became obsolete, and therefore just how long you could bask in the summery glow of owning the latest, greatest, fastest Mac in that particular range. Those days seem to be long gone.
Sure, you could monitor ever rumour site and blog, every Twitter feed that may contain the odd nugget of information, but that’s almost a full-time job in itself. And while some of these sites do have reasonably good sources, all the speculation about exact specifications and the timing of announcements is just that.
A far better approach is the one described by Alex Watson in this issue’s Mac to the Future (see page 84). Apple has a recent track record of refreshing its Mac range whenever Intel launches a new version of the relevant processor, and often it manages to secure supplies of the processor in large quantities before anyone else. So, for example, the next update to the Mac Pro is likely to be shortly after Intel ships its Xeon 5600 ‘Gulftown’ chips. These hexa-core processors are due around the end of April and, given its recent record, Apple is likely to deploy them in single- and dual-processor configurations, raising the mouth-watering possibility of a 12-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro (which should be enough to please Hollin Jones, see page 82). That makes it tempting to delay a Mac Pro purchase until early summer, when those machines are likely to be available. And, as Alex outlines in his column, there are very good reasons also to delay a MacBook Pro purchase.
That’s all good advice, but most of us have been around long enough to know that there’s always something else just around the corner. Whether it’s a faster processor, a new display technology, a new input/output interface, or just a redesigned case, there always seems to be a good reason to delay a decision.
That’s why whenever we’re asked the perennial question ‘should I buy XYZ Mac now or wait until the next version?’ the answer is always ‘if there’s a Mac available that does everything you need it to do and it’s at a price you’re prepared to pay, buy it, don’t wait.’
As for me, I’m off to take my own advice, unless, of course, I discover the Apple Store is down for ‘maintenance’.
