It looks as though Apple is looking to further appeal to professional consumers by offering a high-end MacBooks with eye-watering amount of RAM and Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has issued yet another research note to investors, this time focusing on Apple’s 2017 MacBook and MacBook Pro plans, with the suggestion that the Cupertino-based technology giant is looking to focus on internal component updates to improve the MacBook proposition and further appeal to power users.
One of the key areas to note, which will definitely pique the interest of professional and power users who require brute power, is the potential for the company to refresh the 15-inch MacBook Pro to include up to 32GB of RAM and Intel’s Kaby Lake processor. This change is expected to occur in the fourth quarter of 2017 and will effectively double the amount of RAM bundled into Apple’s top-end MacBook Pro along with the processor being based on Intel’s latest architecture. Due to design restrictions with memory, the analyst also believes that Apple will introduce desktop-class RAM in the machine.
Although the recently released MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar have been extremely well-received, and even more so now that a number of the niggles have been eradicated with a software update, the company has come in for criticism from professionals in the photo and video editing industries for seemingly restricting what they can and can’t do by placing a hard 16GB RAM limit on those machines.
Apple has publicly claimed that this decision was taken as part of an attempt to maximize battery life on the hardware, but it has been taken as somewhat of a limitation. Kuo also believes that the 12-inch MacBook hardware will receive a bump up to 16GB of RAM and Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors.
In addition to upgrades to the 15-inch MacBook Pro, KGI Securities is also suggesting that Apple will begin production of new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros with Kaby Lake processors in the third quarter of this year. The analysts also believe that Apple has plans for the thin-and-light 12-inch MacBook, with mass production expected in the second quarter under the same design and aesthetic conditions that are currently in place, but with the new 16GB RAM option that has been made possible by Intel’s new Kaby Lake architecture.
So, out of those upgrades, which model will you opt for?
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