An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple's upcoming MacBook Air redesign has been extensively reported on, but new information suggests it may come in two sizes. According to Display Supply Chain Consultants' latest quarterly report, Apple is working on a 15-inch version of the laptop to sit alongside the 13-inch model, which may itself get a slightly larger screen as well. TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo followed up on the report, saying that mass production is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2023. Kuo also says that the laptop is being designed to use the same 30W adapter as the MacBook Air, which would put it well below the latest MacBook Pro machines in terms of power consumption. Finally, Kuo notes that this new laptop "might not be called MacBook Air," which is more of a question of branding than anything else and is likely to be in the realm of speculation for a product that's so far out from production.

Does Apple have a "Pro" problem? "[Y]ears of Apple and competitors slapping the name onto wireless earbuds and slightly fancier phones have made it hard to tell what 'Pro' even means," argues The Verge's Mitchell Clark. It could be the reason behind Apple's recently-launched Mac "Studio." From the report: From the jump, Apple made it clear who the Mac Studio and Studio Display were for. It showed them being used by musicians, 3D artists, and developers in its presentation, and the message was clear: these are products for creative professionals or people who aspire to be creative professionals. You know, the same exact crowd it's targeted with MacBook Pro commercials for years. "My first thought was, 'Oh, I wonder when the iPhone Studio comes out,'" says Jonathan Balck, co-founder and managing director of ad agency Colossus, in an interview with The Verge. "Pro was exclusive, and it was about one way of doing things, but the whole culture is moving toward creativity," he adds while musing whether we could see Apple's Pro branding shift to become Studio branding instead.

[T]o me, the Mac Studio line is a clear successor to Apple's iMac Pro. Both computers are powered by monstrous CPUs and come standard with 10Gb Ethernet and a healthy crop of Thunderbolt and USB ports. I'm convinced that, had Apple released the new Studio even two years ago, it would've put "Pro" in the name. (Though, to play devil's advocate, I'm not as sure it would've done so for the Studio Display.) Some marketing experts tell me that the word "Pro" is starting to get long in the tooth, and not just from overuse. "The previous term Pro is, in my opinion, outdated and dry," says Keith Dorsey, founder and CEO of the creative marketing group and management company YoungGuns Entertainment. Balck agrees; "If you look at the word Pro, that is in many ways restrictive," he says in an interview, explaining that when you say a product is "professional," it evokes ideas like job interviews, portfolios, and standoffishness. Pro products, he says, come across as just for those who use creativity to get a paycheck.

The reason Apple may need to, though, is because it led the industry in thoroughly overusing the word "Pro" to the point where it's lost all meaning. It's hard to pinpoint where exactly this started (though, in my mind, it was with the two-port MacBook Pro model), but now the word gets slapped on everything. Want to sell wireless earbuds for even more money? Those are Pro earbuds now. Want to have a regular and fancy version of your phone? No problem, call the nice one the Pro. [...] But Apple's new word, "studio," seems to come ready-made to excite the company's target audience.

Apple may be working on a device with a 20-inch foldable display, which Apple tracker Mark Gurman describes as an "iPad / MacBook hybrid" in Bloomberg's Power On newsletter. The Verge: Gurman says that Apple is, indeed, exploring the possibility of a folding device of the sort, backing up the claims of Ross Young, the CEO and analyst at Display Supply Chain Consultants. Gurman claims the device will feature a dual-screen display that omits a physical keyboard and trackpad -- navigating and typing on the device will be entirely touchscreen-based.

According to tech reporter and Apple leaker Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to launch four M2 Macs throughout 2022. MacWorld reports: The first models will likely arrive later in the year, with the redesigned MacBook Air leading the way, followed by a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac, and entry-level Mac mini. A DigiTimes report on Tuesday said the 13-inch MacBook Pro may launch at Apple's spring event to usher in the new chip. Like 2021, Apple will be releasing Macs with several different chips in 2022. The M2 will be a successor to the M1, likely with the same 8-core design (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), and the M1 Pro and M1 Max will make their way into more high-end Macs. The first of those, the 27-inch iMac, could arrive at Apple's spring event, with a Mac mini coming later in the year. [...] There's also a new Mac Pro due in 2022 as the culmination of the Apple silicon transition. That would mean every Mac line is due for a refresh this year and nearly every model, with only the recently released 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro escaping without a refresh.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple hasn't stopped selling Intel Macs just yet, but it's safe to say that we'll never see a Mac with one of Intel's 12th-generation Core processors in it. But that minor detail isn't stopping the Hackintosh community from supporting new Intel and AMD processors and platforms. The developers behind OpenCore, the most powerful and actively maintained bootloader for loading macOS on standard PC hardware, improved its Alder Lake support in this month's release, version 0.7.7. In a blog post over the weekend, the developers also detailed their efforts to update OpenCore and its associated software to work with Intel's Z690 chipset.

The key to building a functional Hackintosh is normally to build a PC that's as close as possible to actual Intel Mac hardware -- most crucially, the CPU, GPU, and chipset. OpenCore's job is to bridge whatever gap is left between your PC and real Mac hardware so that macOS boots and works properly. It adds support for reading and booting macOS filesystems, loads kernel extensions to support additional hardware, tells macOS how to handle your system's audio outputs and USB ports, and spoofs hardware to take advantage of macOS's built-in support (if, for example, your PC has a GPU that is similar to but not quite identical to a GPU included in a real Intel Mac). As OpenCore has developed and matured, it has gotten better at bridging larger and larger gaps between PC hardware and "real" Macs. It can get old versions of macOS like Tiger (10.4) and Snow Leopard (10.6) up and running on old hardware, and it can even be used to run newer macOS versions on real Macs that Apple has dropped from the official support list. It can even run macOS on AMD processors, albeit with some caveats for software that relies on Intel-specific functionality. The still-active Hackintosh Reddit community is full of people running macOS on all kinds of different hardware.

It's that sort of flexibility that will keep macOS working on 12th-generation Intel CPUs and the Z690 chipset. All of that said, running macOS on newer hardware isn't for the faint of heart, and some things just aren't going to work. Trying to use 12th-gen processors' new efficiency cores (or E-cores) can also cause general slowdowns because macOS doesn't know how to best distribute work between the different types of cores -- macOS doesn't (and never will) support Intel's "Thread Director" technology, which needs to be baked into your operating system to get the best performance. The GPUs from 11th- and 12th-generation Intel processors also won't work in Hackintoshes because they were never supported in real Macs, so you would need to rely on a dedicated AMD GPU to handle display output and other tasks (in real Intel Macs, even iMacs and MacBook Pros with dedicated GPUs still use the integrated Intel GPUs for video and photo encoding and decoding). Apple is still adding support for newer AMD GPUs in macOS releases, presumably so those cards can work in the Mac Pro -- the Radeon RX 6900 series, 6800 series, and RX 6600 XT are all supported -- but Apple could easily decide to stop supporting newer GPUs whenever it wants. And Nvidia GPUs aren't supported at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Todd Haselton: Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year. The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring. It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any consumer benefits and keep up with intensive tasks that people turned to MacBooks to run. Those fears were quickly quelled.

The first M1 Apple chip was launched in 2020 in a MacBook Air laptop. It was more powerful than Intel's chip while offering longer battery life and enabling a fanless design, which helped keep Apple's new MacBook Air even quieter. It proved to be an early success. In April 2021, CEO Tim Cook said during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call that the M1 chip helped fuel the 70.1% growth in Apple's Mac revenue, which hit $9.1 billion during that quarter. The growth continued in fiscal Q3, when Mac revenue was up 16% year over year. That quarter, it launched the all-new iMac, which offered a redesigned super-thin metal body that looks like a screen propped up on a stand. It's slimmer than the Intel models that came before it, while offering other benefits, like a much better webcam, great speakers and a much sharper display than the models it replaced. And Apple made the launch more exciting by offering an array of colors for the iMac, which it hadn't done since it shipped the 1999 iMac. There was a slowdown in fiscal Q4, when Mac revenue grew just 1.6%, as Apple, like all manufacturers, saw a slowdown from the burst of sales driven by the start of the pandemic and dealt with supply chain woes. But fiscal Q4 sales didn't include revenue from its most exciting new computer of the year.

Apple's fiscal Q1 earnings in January will give an indication of how well all its new computers are selling. But it's clear the move from Intel has allowed Apple to move full speed ahead with its own chip development, much like it does for iPhones and iPads, the latter of which has yet to be matched by any other tablet on the market. It's no longer beholden to delays that plagued Intel, which started to lag behind AMD with its new 7nm chips. And Apple has full control over its "stack," which means it can design new computer hardware and software together, instead of letting the power of another company's chips dictate what its computers can and can't do.

Qualcomm is looking to seriously beef up its PC processors, with the company announcing plans for a next-generation Arm-based SoC "designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs" that would be able to go head to head with Apple's M-series processors. From a report: Dr. James Thompson, Qualcomm's chief technology officer, announced the plans for the new chips at the company's 2021 investor day event, with the goal of getting samples to hardware customers in about nine months ahead of product launches with the new chip in 2023. The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company's A-series chips. The company is making big promises, too: in addition to offering competition to Apple's stellar M-series chips (which power its latest MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops and iMac and Mac Mini desktops), Qualcomm is aiming to lead the field for "sustained performance and battery life," too.

The Information today shared alleged details about future Apple silicon chips that will succeed the first-generation M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max chips, which are manufactured based on Apple chipmaking partner TSMC's 5nm process. MacRumors adds: The report claims that Apple and TSMC plan to manufacture second-generation Apple silicon chips using an enhanced version of TSMC's 5nm process, and the chips will apparently contain two dies, which can allow for more cores. These chips will likely be used in the next MacBook Pro models and other Mac desktops, the report says. Apple is planning a "much bigger leap" with its third-generation chips, some of which will be manufactured with TSMC's 3nm process and have up to four dies, which the report says could translate into the chips having up to 40 compute cores. For comparison, the M1 chip has an 8-core CPU and the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips have 10-core CPUs, while Apple's high-end Mac Pro tower can be configured with up to a 28-core Intel Xeon W processor.

Apple is in discussions with Samsung and LG over applying OLED displays with a two-stack tandem structure to future iPad and MacBook models, but the devices are likely several years away from launch, according to Korean website The Elec. MacRumors reports: The report indicates that a two-stack tandem structure would consist of two layers of red, green, and blue emission layers, allowing for the future iPad and MacBook models to have significantly brighter displays with up to double the luminance. Apple's current OLED devices like the iPhone have a single-stack structure, the report adds. Given that OLED technology is expensive, it's likely the displays will be used on future iPad Pro and MacBook Pro models specifically. The report claims the future iPads will come in 11-inch and 12.9-inch sizes, which are indeed the current iPad Pro sizes.

The report claims the two-stack iPad displays will also be low-power LTPO panels, which could allow for a wider ProMotion refresh rate range between 10Hz and 120Hz, in line with the iPhone 13 Pro models. iPad Pro models have already supported ProMotion since 2017, but with a refresh rate between 24Hz and 120Hz. Timing remains a big question mark. While some earlier reports claimed the first iPad with an OLED display was slated for release in 2022, today's report claims the timeframe has been pushed back to late 2023 or 2024. The first MacBook with an OLED display might follow in 2025, but this plan could be postponed further, the report adds.

macOS Monterey, released last week as the latest version of macOS, is bricking older Mac computers, rendering them unusable and unable to even turn on, according to a number of reports from users across social media and online forums. From a report: If this sounds oddly familiar, it may be because last year, with the launch of macOS Big Sur, similar reports surfaced about that update bricking older MacBook Pro models. Less than a year later, similar issues are now seemingly taking place once again. At least ten separate posts on Apple Support Communities contain users complaining that as they were attempting to update their Mac to macOS Monterey, the Mac went completely black and they're unable to turn it on. One post in specific includes several comments from users also reporting similar issues. Reports on Twitter are also plentiful.

Apple this month unveiled an array of new gadgets: more powerful MacBook laptop computers, AirPod wireless headphones with longer battery life and HomePod Mini speakers in three more colors. But a different and unheralded Apple release is garnering so much interest that it has become the company's most back-ordered new product: a $19, 6.3-by-6.3-inch cloth to wipe smudges and fingerprints off screens. From a report: The cloth, imprinted with the Apple logo in the corner, is made with "soft, nonabrasive material" to clean the screens of iPhones, iPads and MacBooks "safely and effectively," according to the product page. The listing adds that the Polishing Cloth -- capital P, capital C -- is "compatible" with 88 different Apple products. For most U.S. shoppers, shipment is delayed until Jan. 11, at the earliest. Charging $19 for a piece of cloth about the size of two stacked dollar bills is bold even by Apple's standards, a company whose legions of loyal customers are conditioned to stomach steep prices. An Apple-branded set of four wheels to "improve mobility" for the Mac Pro, the company's most expensive desktop computer, is priced at $699, for instance.

AnandTech reviews the recently unveiled M1 Pro and M1 Max chips : The M1 Pro and M1 Max change the narrative completely -- these designs feel like truly SoCs that have been made with power users in mind, with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn't expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve. On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance -- the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It's not just 4 additional performance cores, it's a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren't even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren't only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you'd have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max -- it's just generally absurd.

On the GPU side of things, Apple's gains are also straightforward. The M1 Pro is essentially 2x the M1, and the M1 Max is 4x the M1 in terms of performance. Games are still in a very weird place for macOS and the ecosystem, maybe it's a chicken-and-egg situation, maybe gaming is still something of a niche that will take a long time to see make use of the performance the new chips are able to provide in terms of GPU. What's clearer, is that the new GPU does allow immense leaps in performance for content creation and productivity workloads which rely on GPU acceleration. To further improve content creation, the new media engine is a key feature of the chip. Particularly video editors working with ProRes or ProRes RAW, will see a many-fold improvement in their workflow as the new chips can handle the formats like a breeze -- this along is likely going to have many users of that professional background quickly adopt the new MacBook Pro's. For others, it seems that Apple knows the typical MacBook Pro power users, and has designed the silicon around the use-cases in which Macs do shine. The combination of raw performance, unique acceleration, as well as sheer power efficiency, is something that you just cannot find in any other platform right now, likely making the new MacBook Pro's not just the best laptops, but outright the very best devices for the task. It's a comprehensive review, and Intel should be panicking.

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max Apple Silicon chip will feature a new High Power Mode for intensive, sustained workloads, according to Apple. MacRumors reports: This new setting is the opposite of "Low Power Mode," which aims to decrease system performance to prolong battery life. The new mode will only be available on the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip, not the 14-inch model or models with the M1 Pro. Text within the macOS Monterey beta reads, "Your Mac will optimize performance to better support resource-intensive tasks. This may result in louder fan noise." The new mode is not likely to be used in typical work cases, but instead when users may be rendering larger files or graphically intensive tasks that require an added boost of performance. The new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros both include improved thermal architecture, but Apple says the new and improved fans are not likely to be used by most users in day-to-day use.

Bloomberg: There was a sense that, without the moderating influence of the late Steve Jobs, perhaps Jony Ive started to prioritize aesthetics a little too much. Since he stepped down as chief designer at the end of 2019, Apple seems to have reemphasized function. From the iPhone to Apple TV to the Macbook, gone are the days of "The user be damned, we think this looks cool." Monday's unveiling of a new Macbook Pro lineup of laptops provides evidence of the shift. Headline features released five years ago under Ive's aegis have been scrapped. Gone is the so-called "butterfly" keyboard, which rendered the device thinner but whose clunky mechanics made typing more difficult; farewell too to the Touch Bar, a touch sensitive strip display along the top of the keyboard which could show functions for the web browser one moment and mixing tools for music apps the next, but was almost impossible to use without looking; back are HDMI ports, which let you plug the computer into high-definition displays without using an adapter. Perhaps this would have happened under Ive, but Evans Hankey, who now heads the industrial design team, has overseen plenty of other tweaks that seem to indicate a change of philosophy.

[...] But there is merit in sometimes listening to your customers, particularly when the pendulum has swung too far away from function and towards form. After all, you're liable to lose professional customers -- architects, musicians, film-makers -- if they can't plug their laptops into external monitors. And professional users can afford to pay for the top-of-the-range devices that are more profitable to Apple. Dieter Rams, a significant influence on Ive, compiled 10 principles for "Good Design." Number three was "good design is aesthetic." Apple seems to have remembered numbers two and four: "good design makes a product useful" and "good design makes a product understandable."

Nvidia's new RTX 3080 plan for GeForce Now is probably the biggest upgrade for its cloud-streaming service since it turned on RTX ray tracing for subscribers over two years ago. From a report: The new plan is targeted at more traditional gamers for whom 60fps simply doesn't cut it, and it'll cost $100 for every six months you're signed up. In addition to the RTX ray tracing of the Priority plan, it offers 8-hour sessions, up to 1440p and 120fps gaming on PC and Mac (1600p on MacBooks), 4K HDR 60fps with 7.1 surround audio on Nvidia Shield (using DLSS) and up to 120fps on select Android devices. On iOS, GeForce Now has to use Safari rather than a dedicated app, which likely either can't handle or is too locked down to hit the higher frame rates.) According to the company, MacBooks are the second most popular device it sees used by the service, which isn't surprising given how poor the Mac's gaming is compared to PCs. The new MacBook Pro models, with their 120Hz displays, will be able to take advantage of the higher resolution and frame rates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The newly announced 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models have HDMI ports, but they have a limitation that could be frustrating for many users over the long term, according to Apple's specs page for both machines and as noted by Paul Haddad on Twitter. The page says the HDMI port has "support for one display with up to 4K resolution at 60 Hz." That means users with 4K displays at 120 Hz (or less likely, 8K displays at 60 Hz) won't be able to tap the full capability of those displays through this port. It implies limited throughput associated with an HDMI 2.0 port instead of the most recent HDMI 2.1 standard, though there are other possible explanations for the limitation besides the port itself, and we don't yet know which best describes the situation.

Along with new MacBook Pro models, Apple announced during its Mac event today that macOS Monterey will be available on Monday, Oct. 25. Gizmodo reports: As with macOS Big Sur before it, Monterey represents a renewed effort by Apple to streamline its operating systems, with new Focus profiles for limiting notifications and helping you be more productive just like in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. Shortcuts, Apple's automation app, is now available on desktop for the first time. Monterey also represents the first time users will be able to AirPlay content from a Mac, a function that iPhone users have long enjoyed. If you've already downloaded iOS 15, updating to Monterey just makes sense -- these devices are so much more functional when they work seamlessly with each other.

But perhaps the most anticipated feature Monterey is supposed to bring us is Universal Control, which allows you to use a single mouse/trackpad and keyboard to control multiple Macs and iPads simultaneously. While the new feature wasn't initially included in the public beta rollout of Monterey, that omission has only allowed the hype to grow. It's unclear when Universal Control will come to macOS, only that it won't be available to use at launch. FaceTime's new SharePlay feature, which is also expected to arrive in iOS 15, will also not be ready to try at launch. That feature will allow you to share music or watch shows with folks over FaceTime. The devices that support macOS Monterey include: iMac (late 2015 and newer), iMac Pro (2017 and newer), Mac Pro (late 2013 and newer), Mac Mini (late 2014 and newer), MacBook Pro (early 2015 and newer), MacBook Air (early 2015 and newer), and MacBook (early 2016 and newer).

Further reading: macOS Monterey Release Candidate Undoes Safari Changes, Reintroduces Old Tab Design

Apple today announced M1 Pro and M1 Max, its new chips for the Mac. Apple: M1 Pro and M1 Max introduce a system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture to pro systems for the first time. The chips feature fast unified memory, industry-leading performance per watt, and incredible power efficiency, along with increased memory bandwidth and capacity. M1 Pro offers up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 32GB of unified memory. M1 Max delivers up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth -- 2x that of M1 Pro and nearly 6x that of M1 -- and support for up to 64GB of unified memory. And while the latest PC laptops top out at 16GB of graphics memory, having this huge amount of memory enables graphics-intensive workflows previously unimaginable on a notebook. The efficient architecture of M1 Pro and M1 Max means they deliver the same level of performance whether MacBook Pro is plugged in or using the battery. M1 Pro and M1 Max also feature enhanced media engines with dedicated ProRes accelerators specifically for pro video processing. M1 Pro and M1 Max are by far the most powerful chips Apple has ever built.

Utilizing the industry-leading 5-nanometer process technology, M1 Pro packs in 33.7 billion transistors, more than 2x the amount in M1. A new 10-core CPU, including eight high-performance cores and two high-efficiency cores, is up to 70 percent faster than M1, resulting in unbelievable pro CPU performance. Compared with the latest 8-core PC laptop chip, M1 Pro delivers up to 1.7x more CPU performance at the same power level and achieves the PC chip's peak performance using up to 70 percent less power. Even the most demanding tasks, like high-resolution photo editing, are handled with ease by M1 Pro. M1 Pro has an up-to-16-core GPU that is up to 2x faster than M1 and up to 7x faster than the integrated graphics on the latest 8-core PC laptop chip.1 Compared to a powerful discrete GPU for PC notebooks, M1 Pro delivers more performance while using up to 70 percent less power. And M1 Pro can be configured with up to 32GB of fast unified memory, with up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth, enabling creatives like 3D artists and game developers to do more on the go than ever before.

M1 Max features the same powerful 10-core CPU as M1 Pro and adds a massive 32-core GPU for up to 4x faster graphics performance than M1. With 57 billion transistors -- 70 percent more than M1 Pro and 3.5x more than M1 -- M1 Max is the largest chip Apple has ever built. In addition, the GPU delivers performance comparable to a high-end GPU in a compact pro PC laptop while consuming up to 40 percent less power, and performance similar to that of the highest-end GPU in the largest PC laptops while using up to 100 watts less power.2 This means less heat is generated, fans run quietly and less often, and battery life is amazing in the new MacBook Pro. M1 Max transforms graphics-intensive workflows, including up to 13x faster complex timeline rendering in Final Cut Pro compared to the previous-generation 13-inch MacBook Pro. M1 Max also offers a higher-bandwidth on-chip fabric, and doubles the memory interface compared with M1 Pro for up to 400GB/s, or nearly 6x the memory bandwidth of M1. This allows M1 Max to be configured with up to 64GB of fast unified memory. With its unparalleled performance, M1 Max is the most powerful chip ever built for a pro notebook.

Alongside the new MacBook Pros, Apple has added a new first party polishing cloth to the Apple Store. The new polishing cloth is a soft white with an embossed Apple logo. From a report: Apple does not specify what material it is made out of. It's priced at $19.00 and Apple says it's compatible with every single device they make.

Apple just dropped a new version of the MacBook Pro that draws a much clearer line between the system and its perennial favorite thin-and-light sibling. From a report: The new system is powered by the new M1 Pro and Max, souped up versions of the chip the company unveiled at today's event. The company says the 10-core chip is capable of allowing up to 3x the memory bandwidth and up to of the M1, coupled with a 16 core GPU. The Max, meanwhile, bumps the GPU up to 32 cores. What's clear is that the company is targeting its bread and butter creative pro demographic in ways it didn't with last year's models. Unlike last year's model, the new models, which are available in 14- and 16-inch models offer entirely new redesigns. They also feature built-in fans for high-performance applications, though the company says it will rarely turn on. The system also marks the end of the middling-received Touchbar, with a full function key in its place.

As one feature leaves, an old favorite returns. Magsafe is back. The third-gen charger sports a proprietary port, but users will be able to continue charging via the Thunderbolt/USB-C ports. And, yes, this thing has ports. Three thunderbolt 4, HDMI and an SDXC card slot, to be exact. The bezel has been reduced, instead opting for an iPhone-style notch at the top to house the webcam. The camera has -- thankfully -- been upgraded for these teleconferencing days at 1080p (no 4k, sadly, but an improvement over the long-standing model) with a larger sensor and wider aperture. The 14-inch starts at $1,999, while the 16-inch runs $2,499. The Max version of the M1 is available as an upgrade, adding an additional $200 for the 24-core GPU and $400 for the 36-core version.