Apple is expected to stage a product launch in only a few days, with announcements including new members of the Mac family.
The event, reportedly set for Tuesday, October 29, will showcase new Mac desktop PCs, including the Mac mini, and updated MacBook Pro laptops.
According to notable Apple leaker Mark Gurman, the MacBook Air line is not expected to adopt the latest Apple M4 processors at this event
Apple is reportedly just beginning production of this latest generation of its more accessible laptop line, meaning they won’t be ready for sale until 2025.
We don’t expect any radical new designs in the other models, with the bump-up to Apple M4 performance the big change.
This processor was announced in May during Apple’s WWDC 2024, the World Wide Developer Conference. It made its debut in the iPad Pro.
That means we haven’t yet seen how powerful the Apple M4 family will get. Apple produces punchier Pro and Max CPUs, available in Macs and MacBook Pros but not iPads.
Big changes for this new generation include, as gadget fans might guess, a significant leap in AI power.
General performance is also up to 25 per cent better, and changes in how it operates under the hood mean even better energy efficiency. And the Apple M3 was already no slouch on that front.
Do owners of MacBooks with earlier-generation Apple M-series hardware need to upgrade? Short of a big change we have not heard about, probably not.
All MacBooks and Macs with an M-series processor will support Apple Intelligence, which is set to arrive on iPhones on Monday, October 28 and presumably laptops at a similar date.
The timing suggests that, nevertheless, Apple’s take on consumer AI will be used to attempt to get some of us to upgrade our hardware sooner than we otherwise might have done.
Apple Intelligence will provide summaries of documents, introduce a smarter and more natural-sounding Siri, and let you generate emojis. However, many more fun features won’t be available until 2025, with only the first set to be unveiled at the end of this month.
