Mounting evidence for a Macworld announcement of Minis and iMacs

Mac Minis and iMacs will see updates at Macworld, it is almost certain.  It seems that Apple is quickly moving its whole lineup to NVIDIA chipsets in order for the new models to take advantage of the GPU crunching abilities of Snow Leopard and the Open CL specification from the  Khronos Group.  The whole portable lineup currently is running NVIDIA chips.  Snow Leopard is widely rumored to be shipping ahead of schedule and we’ll likely get some sneak peeks at Macworld.

A few sites falsely reported that iMacs would recieve updates in November.  Some of those same sites have been reporting that the Mini had been EOL’ed in 2007.  Not true it seems.

Today, Insanely Mac Forum member (via MR) found further evidence (also Wired Magazine) in the form of  some strings that indicate that Minis and iMacs will be getting the NVIDIA chipsets as well.  This isn’t groundbreaking as Steve Jobs said the whole Mac lineup was moving to Mini DisplayPort shortly which is, so far, only the realm of NVIDIA.

More than likely, the iMac refresh will only be internal.  The iMac represents the direction other Apple products are driving towards (Cinema display, iPhone) and hasn’t changed since the plastic/Aluminum crossover.  There also isn’t much to change on the Mini unless major features are changed (like 3.5 inch Hard Drive).

Digitimes thinks the new iMacs will have Intel quad core processors as well.

Intel is planning to launch three 65W low-power desktop CPUs targeting small form factor (SFF) PCs and all-in-one PCs in the middle of January next year, according to sources at PC vendors.

Intel will launch the Core 2 Quad Q8200s (2.33GHz/4MB L2), Core 2 Quad Q9400s (2.66GHz/6MB L2) and Core 2 Quad Q9550s (2.83GHz/12MB L2) with prices at US$245, US$320 and US$369, respectively in thousand-unit tray quantities. These CPUs will have the same specifications as standard CPUs with the same model number, but will see their TDP drop from 95W to 65W.

It would make sense that the Mac Pros would also see updates to Intel’s Core i7 line of processors and new NVidia chipsets.  This would give Apple’s whole lineup the ability to take advantage of Snow Leopard’s OpenCL GPU optimization features.