In the last few days, a series of posts here from MacMagazine dissected the new MacBooks Pro in every possible and imaginable aspect: we talk about design, creation process, Touch Bar, benchmarks, Removable SSDs, graphics performance, what came and what didn’t (like the beloved boot sound).
Now that we’ve basically covered every face of this remarkable and controversial notebook, what do we have left? Talk about the future, of course – since the machine of rumors and speculation, like time, does not stop. And, for such an assignment, nothing better than having the predictive skills of Ming-Chi Kuo, our well-known old analyst at KGI Securities with an enviable hit rate on the curriculum.
According to Kuo, 2017 should be an interesting year, not only for MacBooks Pro, but for the entire line of Apple portable computers. The analyst’s main bet is very encouraging: he believes that, for the second half of the year, Apple will lower the prices of all MacBooks, based on the argument that the introduction of new technologies and paradigms – as is the case with new MBPs – always come with great prices, as was the case with the original MacBook Air and the first MacBook Pro with Retina display, for example.
Kuo also predicts that, over the next year, technologies employed by Apple’s new laptop, such as the Thunderbolt 3 and Touch Bar, will begin to gain more support and acceptance by industry and consumers and, with that, the receptivity to new machines will finally heat up.
Finally, Kuo bets that, also in the second half, an update of the MacBook Pro will be announced with the possibility of configuring the much desired 32GB of RAM. There is, however, a question: the analyst says that this possibility will only be embraced by Apple if Intel launches architecture chips in time “Cannonlake”, capable of exceeding the current maximum 16GB without compromising the battery.
In time: a full explanation has appeared on Reddit – always him – delving into the reasons why the new MacBooks Pro are limited to 16GB of RAM. We have already published the simple official justification of Apple here, but if you want something more satisfactory, basically the question is that the architecture “Skylake”, on which the processors of the new MBPs are based, * does not * support memories of the LPDDR4 type (LP, in this case, designates “Low Power”; in Portuguese, “Baixa Energia”), capable of reaching 32GB or more. Apparently, the next generation “Kaby Lake” will only support LPDDR4 on chips in the “U” category, which is not the one employed by Apple; therefore, according to this logic, only in 2018 would we see MBPs with up to 32GB of RAM.
In other news talking about the MacBooks Pro of the future, the South Korean website ETNews reported, citing “anonymous sources close to the subject,” that Apple is planning to incorporate OLED in full force into its product line starting next year, and one of the first targets is its line of professional portable computers (or not) ).
Although the Touch Bar (and other Apple products, such as the Apple Watch) already incorporates the technology, apparently the main screen of the MacBooks Pro is that it will undergo a major change when replacing the traditional LCD with the modern OLED, which brings benefits such as lower consumption of energy, greater color contrast and the possibility of thinner and lighter designs.
According to the report, whoever supplies the Touch Bar displays to Apple is none other than Samsung, and this partnership could also extend to the main screens of Apple laptops if the switch to OLED is consummated in the future. Before anyone cares, parts of the Sammy that explode are batteries (and a single product), not screens. So we can rest easy.
[via[viaMacRumors: 1, 2; 9to5Mac]
