October is almost over, but by the time spooky season is done, Apple may have a jump scare planned for all those with their finger on the tech pulse. The company is reportedly gearing up for some sort of product launch soon enough, this time dropping new versions of the MacBook Pro and iMac
Apple news overlord Mark Gurman wrote on Sunday that we could see a product launch toward the end of October. This will be a Mac-centric launch compared to the phone and wearable-focused Wonderlust event from September. Gurman is more sure that we’ll finally see an iMac refresh this year than potential Apple laptops. He points out that Apple stores are lacking supplies of iMacs and MacBook Pro models, as evidenced by the company’s website showing some products won’t arrive until the middle of November.
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This new iMac could be larger than past models at 32 inches, which would be the biggest all-in-one desktop PC the company ever released. This new release could tide over Apple fans who may have expected the company to share details on the next generation of iPads. Likely, we won’t see hide nor hair of Apple tablets this year.
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With those stock shortages, there’s also a chance Apple could share new 14 and/or 16-inch MacBook Pros, according to the Bloomberg writer. That’s more of a stretch, especially considering Apple already released new M2-powered 14 and 16-inch Pro models earlier this year. Whether these new laptops would feature an M3 chip remains to be seen, but other Apple rumormongers have suggested an M3-powered MacBook won’t see the light of day until next year.
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The last iMac saw release in 2024, but Apple has been mum on a return with any new, updated specs or larger screen sizes. It was supposed to get an M2 silicon update, but plans changed with the advent of the M3 chip. Fellow Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo cited his own sources in the Cupertino company’s supply chain saying that we’ll have to wait until 2025 for a 32-inch version of the iMac. Gurman writes that Apple had originally planned for an M1-powered desktop, then an M2 24-inch iMac Pro, but those never materialized due to costs.
Apple tried to tide over Mac desktop users with the M1-powered Mac Studio, but of course, that’s nowhere close to the same thing. The latest Apple release was the new Apple Pencil 3 with USB-C, and with the company’s quarterly earnings report coming up Nov. 2, Apple may try to end the year on a high note.
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Apple’s investors might be looking harder at Apple’s plans for the near future, especially considering how the AI hype train has infected the entirety of the tech sphere. The Tim Cook-led company hasn’t made much explicit mention of its efforts to cash in on the AI hype train, though it has released plenty of products that use artificial intelligence in less explicit ways. We already know that Apple is working on some kind of AI digital framework as well as an “Apple GPT” chatbot. Cook previously claimed in an earnings call that his company has long been looking forward to AI, but Apple was reportedly caught flatfooted once OpenAI ChatGPT sparked a wave of utterly pointless AI integrations from those just looking to cash in.
Gurman quoted an unnamed person with knowledge of Apple’s AI issues saying “it’s considered a pretty big miss internally.” Instead, the company could be trying to apply generative AI to Siri to finally make the digital assistant much better at comprehending and responding to prompts. This could come as soon as next year. At the same time, Apple will be acting much like Google and Microsoft and filling its next iOS release to the brim with AI, such as in Apple Music for AI-generated playlists or Pages to write dull, dry content.
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If there’s anything truly frightening about this October, it’s that every tech company big and small has forced users to adopt AI, whether its actually helpful or not.
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