14 DAY TRIAL // Previously available to ship in 24 hours, any iMac ordered from the Apple Online Store now has a delivery quota of 3-5 business days. Since the models aren’t new and demand isn’t exactly skyrocketing, the tech blogosphere is starting to make the usual assumptions: a refresh is on the way.
With WWDC just around the corner, it’s only natural to expect one or two hardware announcements from the fruity company, but even more indication that this might be the case comes straight from the Apple Online Store, where the shipping times for any iMac model you might order have slipped considerably.
The all-in-ones used to have a 24-hour shipping quota, which is the standard delivery estimate for most Apple products. It basically means the product is in stock and Apple will be more than happy to send it to your door pronto. In recent days, however, the company has had a change of heart.
For one reason or another, ordering an iMac today means you have to wait up to five business days (skipping weekends) to have it delivered to your door. This bodes well with a prediction made by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities earlier this year.
Kuo forecast that Apple was set to deploy cheaper iMacs around mid-2014, and there are rumors that the Mac maker will announce at least a couple of hardware announcements at next week’s opening keynote.
These rumors also include iMacs with Retina/4K resolutions, but dropping prices while at the same time adding such expensive displays could prove hard, if not impossible.
Nevertheless, the price of any technology goes down every year, making room for newer technologies to take their place and inherit their high price tags, respectively. The problem is Apple always wants the new stuff and so do the customers.
The Cupertino giant has yet to drop any hints regarding what will be announced at WWDC14, stating only “We have the most amazing developer community in the world and have a great week planned for them,” in a press release dating April 3, 2014.
In it, Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, added (emphasis ours) “Every year the WWDC audience becomes more diverse, with developers from almost every discipline you can imagine and coming from every corner of the globe. We look forward to sharing with them our latest advances in iOS and OS X so they can create the next generation of great apps.”
And if the new store listings mean nothing, common sense will tell you Apple is approaching a new refresh cycle, if only just to boost the processor inside these babies.