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According to the Mac Buyer's Guide, the Mac Pro averages 236 days between refreshes; but it has been 510 days since it was last updated. The iMac was last updated 279 days ago; its average is 221. (Rumor is that updates are coming Tuesday, which, if true, will be just 19 days after I bought a 27" Core i7 iMac.) On the portable side, the Macbook Air has gone 413 days without an update, when its average is 255 days. Finally, the Mac mini was recently updated within a normal time interval, but it was a cosmetic update only—the machine kept the positively geriatric Core 2 Duo. All told, Apple looks set to skip Intel's 32nm Westmere generation almost entirely, and this was after the company appeared reluctant to upgrade to Nehalem. There are probably a few reasons why Apple has been slow to refresh its Mac line.

First, there's the fairly remote possibility that Apple could be seriously considering AMD. Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge will, by all accounts, be an incredibly strong family of processors, so it's hard to imagine that Apple will jump ship for AMD at this point. But Bulldozer is a truly novel architecture in many respects, and with all such attempts at radical (as opposed to incremental) improvements, it's likely to either really rock or really flop. If the project works and AMD can deliver a cheap, high-performance Sandy Bridge alternative that doesn't waste any die space on an integrated GPU, then Bulldozer would be a great option for Apple. The company would be free again to choose between ATI and NVIDIA discrete GPUs, without having to engineer around Intel's IGP.

It's true that Apple has been slow to incorporate Intel's latest and greatest processors, especially in its portables, but the likely reasons are mundane. Apple wants hardware-accelerated OpenCL to be available across its entire range of systems. Intel's latest-generation integrated GPUs are not bad performers—they're not going to set any records, but they're in the same ballpark as the NVIDIA chipsets Apple is using instead. However, they currently lack OpenCL support.

The lack of OpenCL support does not appear to be some insurmountable hardware flaw, but rather a software issue. Over on the Windows side of the fence, Microsoft has an equivalent to OpenCL called DirectCompute. It's part of Direct3D 11. Intel's integrated graphics processors don't support DirectCompute either—but the company apparently says that they will, in a new driver revision due some time this year.

The memory controller complaint is specious. It's true that from an idealist perspective Intel's latest designs are in some ways a backwards step, and it's true that the latest processors exhibit worse scores in certain synthetic benchmarks due to the movement of the memory controller, but the practical repercussions of this seem slight. The many, many benchmarks that the hardware review sites run may show a little difference due to the change, but not one that's likely to be noticed.

In any case, for Apple portables currently using members of the venerable Core 2 line, Intel's latest processors are unambiguously a step up in performance, even with the suboptimal memory controller location. It doesn't matter that they're not as good as the top-end parts the company offers; they're better than the ones Apple is using.

Macbook Air has gone 413 days without an update, when its average is 255 days.

Raven wrote:I wonder how many generations of CPU my computer can be out of date before I really need another update. I'm already 1 or 2 back with my Core 2 quad.