Apple at its October 30 event in New York, apart from unveiling the all-new MacBook Air, also launched all-new Mac mini. As was the case with the case with the MacBook Air, the Mac mini hasn't seen a design refresh in years - since 2014 to be precise. Apple says the all-new Mac mini offers five times the performance as previous generations, up to 6-core processors, apart from more memory capacity (up to 64GB of RAM), and all-flash storage. Like the new MacBook Air, it comes with the Apple T2 Security Chip, which instead of enabling Touch ID here, provides on-the-fly data encryption amongst other features. Apple also launched two new iPad Pro models at the New York event.
The all-new Mac mini starts at $799 (roughly Rs. 58,800), and is up for pre-orders today in the US. It will go on sale on November 7 - which is the same date the all-new MacBook Air. No India availability or pricing has yet been detailed. The Mac mini like its laptop cousin is also the first in its series to be made out of 100 percent recycled aluminium that gives it a smaller carbon footprint - nearly 50 percent less than the previous generation. There is also a brand new air flow cooling system.
The 2018 Mac mini will be powered by a choice of quad-core and 6-core 8th-Generation Intel Core processors, with Turbo Boost clock speeds up to 4.6GHz. Users can choose up to 64GB of RAM, clocked up to 2666MHz. Buyers also have SSD storage options up to 2TB. As for the Apple T2 Security Chip, it features an SSD controller that provides on-the-fly data encryption, and HEVC video transcoding (30 times faster than previous generations), apart from a Secure Enclave that ensures the "software loaded in the boot process is not tampered with."
pple introduced new iPhones and Apple Watches last month, but the older product lines accounted for $45 billion in sales in the most recent fiscal quarter. In comparison, iPhones brought in revenue of $141.3 billion.
"They really wanted to show the world they haven't forgotten about the iPad and the Mac," said Mika Kitagawa, a senior principal research analyst at Gartner.
The Mac lineup has been in need of a boost.
In July when Apple reported its most recent quarter, the company had its worst quarter of Mac sales since 2010, with unit volumes down 13 percent year over year. And iPad unit sales were up only 1 percent versus a year earlier, and revenue for both was down 5 percent from the prior year.
But some of that dip in Mac sales was explained by timing - Apple waited to release new Macs until July, when it had in previous years offered them in June. More broadly, Mac sales growth has outpaced the PC market and the iPad has been the most successful tablet in a market that turned out to be smaller than Apple hoped when it released the device in 2010.
While Apple has held prices down on some items like its entry-level iPads for schools, analyst had widely expected it to hold or raise prices for its new laptops and desktop.
With Mac laptops in particular, consumers increasingly use phones or tablets for quick tasks and only turn to a full-fledged computer when they need extra horsepower. Apple is unlikely to cut corners to drop the price of its entry-level laptops, analysts had said.