Apple has some new Mac On the horizon, but unfortunately we won’t see these devices this year – presumably the new ones won’t appear until early 2023.
This is the latest news of well-known leaker Mark Gorman who made the prediction in his newsletter as I published it Bloomberg (Opens in a new tab).
The theory is — stay skeptical as ever, and note that Gurman only thinks that’s the likely outcome of Apple’s launch in the near future — that revamped Macs will come in the first quarter of 2023, and that will include the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro packing laptops M2 Pro and M2 Max chips.
This device will arrive side by side macOS Ventura 13.3 (and iOS 16.3), Gurman confirms, the software will likely debut in February or March 2023. With hardware, however, a February launch seems unlikely — Apple generally waits until spring, so the MacBook Pro date What’s new (and anything else coming) write in your journal in March 2023.
Speaking of other things that may be in Apple’s PC product pipeline, as has long been rumored, Apple is testing a Mac mini with an M2 chip, and also the M2 Pro version.
Gurman believes the M2 Max will push it to 12 cores (up from 10 with the M1 Max) and complement that with 38 onboard GPUs (up from 32 cores).
Analysis: Clear signs of a MacBook launch delay
Things change quickly in the Mac rumors scene, because as you may remember, just two weeks ago, Gurman thought the MacBook Pro with the M2 Pro and M2 Max Likely to arrive in November. But to be fair to the leaker, right from the start when he first aired speculation about updated MacBook Pros, he’s given a time frame from the end of 2022 to early 2023 for the launch – and March qualifies (only) for the latter.
Apparently Apple’s plan was to debut MacBook Pro models before the 2022 release, but recently we’ve seen some clear signs that’s not happening, Gorman explained in his newsletter.
CEO Tim Cook told us that Apple’s line of products is ‘set’ for the holiday season, which means there will be no new additions. On top of that, CFO Luca Maestri also explained that Apple expects less revenue growth for the holiday quarter – with Mac revenue lower due to the lack of a new MacBook (while we got a new MacBook Pro last year at this point).
So there you have it. This time around, there was no mention of what to expect with the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro M2 portables, so we can assume that nothing has changed on this front. Previous predictions indicated that there is not much difference with the next generation machines, and the main upgrade is to change the SoC from the M1 variants to the M2.
With the Mac mini, the working theory is that there will be a base model with an M2 chip, and another with the M2 Pro that will sit on top of the entry-level PC, but less than MacStudio. This three-pronged approach makes sense in effectively giving buyers three options in the low, mid and upper range of the spectrum.