The Sunday Rumor Bulletin that Mark Gurman maintains has been loaded with plenty of delicious news today, refining details on the next batch of new Macs we’ll be seeing from next year. There’s a lot to discuss, but it’s not all good news.
Apparently Apple had to backtrack on its chip plans, eliminating what was supposed to be its top of the line. And that leaves a potentially badly damaged computer: the Mac Pro may not be what it was going to be.
Mac Pro, but not so Pro
Let’s go in parts. This is what Mark Gurman expects from the Mac lineup:
- It expects new MacBook Pro models based on the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips early next year, confirming rumors that they were due to launch last month and were eventually delayed.
- He estimates the launch of a new iMac with the M3 chip at the end of 2023 “at the earliest”. There will be no iMacs with M2 chips, and models with more advanced chips have also been delayed.
- Mac mini models with M2 and M2 Pro chips are still being tested.
- There will be new monitors, including a successor to the XDR Pro Display (longer term rather) and a new Studio Display with ProMotion. All models will continue to feature a chip that would offload some tasks from Macs so they can work with less of a load.
The development of an M2 Extreme chip would have been canceled because it was too demanding in its development
The bad news comes with the Mac Pro. It is still in development, but Apple reportedly decided to cancel ‘M2 Extreme’ chip that he was going to enter her heart (and that it was going to presumably be two ‘M2 Ultra’ coming together to work together). Now, the Mac Pro will pack an M2 Ultra chip with up to 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores, and 192GB of base RAM.
The reason for the change could be the price: we could have been looking at a Mac Pro for over $10,000, and Gurman thinks that would have led to very few people buying it. The development effort wouldn’t have been worth trying to be too ambitious.
The Mac Pro would still be a computer with expansion possibilities, there would be room to place more RAM, more storage and more graphics power. He would continue to focus on the more professional ones.
The source thinks that we will see this new Mac Pro in 2023, although he does not dare to predict if it will happen at the beginning of this year or rather at the end. Doubts remain, but it’s increasingly clear to us that Apple has been forced to make some big changes to its Mac program.
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