The MacBook Pro will receive the M2 treatment from this fall

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the second-generation updates to the current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro design could arrive as early as this fall. The updated laptops will feature more powerful chips based on Apple’s M2, he claims.

In his weekly Power On newsletter, the journalist – who has previously covered closely on upcoming Apple products – wrote that the overall design of the MacBook Pro “will likely remain about the same,” with no major new visual changes or features beyond. than what comes with the M2 generation of system-on-a-chip.

Gurman predicts that unsurprisingly, the two new MacBook Pro models will offer buyers a choice between an M2 Pro and an M2 Max chip. These chips will be much faster and more geared towards heavy workflows than the M2 shipped in the 2022 refreshes of the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro in recent months.

“Look at a lot of the focus on the graphics side,” Gurman writes. That makes sense; the M2 offered a modest boost in CPU performance over its predecessor (10 to 20 percent, depending on the task), but offers significantly better graphics performance — up to 40 percent faster.

A fall launch would suggest the MacBook Pro will adopt an iPhone-like annual update cadence. But it also seems a little more aggressive than we expected. The M1 Pro and M1 Max rolled out a full year after the first M1 machines, so if Apple keeps up the pace in its second-generation chips, we expect the MacBook Pro to be refreshed in Spring 2023, not Fall. 2022.

Gurman acknowledges that this is also a possibility. “Given the ongoing challenges in the supply chain,” he writes, “it’s hard to predict when these will hit store shelves.” Still, the laptops are likely to arrive this fall, despite Apple’s M1 rollout pace. That’s partly because it may be faster for Apple to develop second-generation chips than the first.

List image by Samuel Axon