MacBook Pro 2022 dreams dead as Apple rumored to delay launch

Apple has some new Macs on the horizon, but we won’t see these devices this year sadly – the fresh hardware supposedly won’t turn up until early 2023.

This is the latest from well-known leaker Mark Gurman, who made the prediction in his newsletter as published by Bloomberg.

The theory is – stay sceptical as ever, and note that Gurman only believes this is the probable outcome of near future Apple launches – that revamped Macs will come in the first quarter of 2023, and that will include MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch laptops packing M2 Pro and M2 Max chips.

That hardware will arrive alongside macOS Ventura 13.3 (and iOS 16.3), Gurman asserts, software that’ll likely debut in February or March 2023. With the hardware, however, a February launch seems unlikely – Apple generally waits until the spring, so the date for the new MacBook Pros (and whatever else is coming) to pencil in to your diary is March 2023.

Speaking of what else might be in Apple’s PC product pipeline, as has long been rumored, Apple is testing a Mac mini with the M2 chip, and also an M2 Pro version.

Gurman reckons the M2 Max will push to 12-cores (from 10 with the M1 Max) and complement that with 38-cores for the integrated GPU (up from 32-cores).

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Analysis: Clear signs that MacBook launch has been pushed back

Things are changing fast in the Mac rumor landscape, because as you may recall, just two weeks back, Gurman believed that the MacBook Pros with the M2 Pro and M2 Max would most likely arrive in November. But to be fair to the leaker, from the get-go when he first aired speculation around these refreshed MacBook Pros, he gave a timeframe of the end of 2022 to early 2023 for launch – and March (just) qualifies for the latter.

Apparently Apple’s plan was to debut the MacBook Pro models before 2022 was out, but recently, we’ve seen some pretty clear signs that this is not happening, as Gurman outlines in his newsletter.

Namely CEO Tim Cook telling us that Apple’s product line is ‘set’ for the holiday season, meaning there’ll be no new additions. Furthermore, CFO Luca Maestri has also made it known that Apple is expecting less revenue growth for the holiday quarter – with Mac revenue dropping due to not having a new MacBook (whereas we did get a new MacBook Pro last year at this point).

So there you have it. This time around, no mention was made of what to expect with these new M2-toting MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch portables, so we can assume nothing has changed on that front. Previous predictions have pointed to there being not a lot of difference with the next-gen machines, the main upgrade being that change of SoC from M1 to M2 variants.

With the Mac mini, the working theory is that there’ll be a base model with M2 chip, and one with the M2 Pro which will sit above that entry-level PC, but below the Mac Studio. That three-pronged approach makes sense in effectively giving buyers a trio of options at the low, mid-range and higher-end of the spectrum.

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