Will 12-Inch MacBook Be Passed Over For Skylake Upgrade?

A topic of some puzzlement to those of us who take notice of such things is that Apple has yet to upgrade any of its MacBook models to Intel’s latest Skylake Core CPUs. Several Windows PC laptops are now powered by Skylake silicon, including Microsoft’s new detachable screen Surface Book, but Apple has soldiered on with last year’s Intel Broadwell CPUs, including in the most recently introduced 12-inch MacBook with Retina display. The 15-inch MacBook Pro still is powered by two year old Haswell technology.

My provisional expectation has been that the MacBooks will get Skylake upgrades sometime in the first half of 2016, but The Motley Fool’s Ashraf Eassa suggests that Apple might at this point skip Skylake-based processors altogether and wait for Intel’s next generation Kaby Lake silicon, the first mobile versions of which his sources suggest will become available late in the second quarter or early third quarter of 2016. The downside to that strategy would be that Apple’s most advanced design notebook would go without an update for longer than a year, while the PC competition, buoyed by widespread positive consumer embrace of Windows 10, hasn’t exactly been letting proverbial grass grow under its feet.

As I suggested in my The ‘Book Mystique column here last week, I think there’s a strong likelihood of a major refresh for the MacBook Pro and possibly even a redesign of the MacBook Air in the first half of 2016 — at least by WWDC in June, and possibly much earlier than that. Eassa is of similar mind, and projects a March announcement of new Skylake-based Pro’s and Airs, which would distract scrutiny and criticism of waiting for the next generation chips for the little MacBook, especially since, as he observes, Apple seems to be doing just fine in the marketplace, with its current Broadwell-powered 12-inch MacBook still gaining share against the Skylake powered Windows competition.

Eassa notes that Kaby Lake is expected have both improved in CPU performance and more advanced 3D graphics, and hardware support for additional video tweaks. And then there’s 10-nanometer Cannonlake chip projected to debut in mid-2017 with substantial efficiency improvements.

You can find all the details in Ashraf Eassa’s article at:
http://bit.ly/1OKBzRs