According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, second-generation updates to the current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro could arrive as early as this fall. According to him, the updated laptops will be equipped with more powerful chips based on the Apple M2.
In his weekly Power On newsletter, a journalist who previously reported accurately on future Apple products wrote that the overall design of the MacBook Pro “will probably stay about the same”without any major new visual changes or features. with M2 generation system-on-a-chip.
“Look for graphics to be the primary focus,” writes Gurman. It makes sense; The M2 offered a modest CPU performance boost over its predecessor (10-20 percent, depending on the task), but it offers significantly better graphics performance – up to 40 percent faster.
The fall launch suggests that the MacBook Pro will use yearly iPhone-like updates. But it also seems a bit more aggressive than we expected. The M1 Pro and M1 Max were released a year after the first M1 machines, so if Apple kept releasing second-gen chips at the same pace, we’d actually be expecting a Spring 2023 MacBook Pro refresh, not Fall 2021.
Gurman admits that this is also possible. “Given ongoing supply chain issues,” he writes, “it is difficult to predict exactly when they will hit store shelves.” That said, it’s likely that the laptops will arrive this fall, despite the pace of Apple’s M1 launches. This is partly because Apple can develop second-generation chips faster than the first.