Apple Silicon Macs

Apple has very rarely announced Mac hardware during its September events, so we don’t think anybody was really expecting the first Apple Silicon Macs to show up yesterday, and that definitely doesn’t mean that they’re not still coming.

In fact, we’d put money on Apple’s Silicon getting its own third event later this fall once the first Macs are ready to ship with the new chips, which are likely to be the smaller MacBooks — the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and possibly even the return of a 12-inch MacBook.

Recent reports have suggested that these first Apple Silicon MacBooks will be powered by a new A14X chip, which is more or less the typical upgraded version of the baseline A-series chip that Apple packs into its iPad Pro models. This could mean that we see a new iPad Pro unveiled at the same Mac event, since Apple could use the opportunity to highlight how the iPad Pro and new MacBooks are powered by the exact same chips.

Either way, however, the more powerful Macs won’t be getting the Apple Silicon treatment until sometime next year, since Apple needs to work on the GPU side of things for those models. Rumour has it that a new iMac is in the works for mid-2021 that will feature a custom Apple-designed GPU to run alongside the A14X.