A new report by a respected Apple insider suggests the company is planning to launch a series of new Macs and MacBooks in 2023, including a Mac Pro, an iMac… and two MacBook Airs.
While the rumors of a new iMac and Mac Pro make a lot of sense as they are two products that haven’t been updated in a while, the suggestion that the new MacBook Air (M2, 2022) will also be released soon after the MacBook Air is more disturbing.
Let’s start with the good news (assuming this report is accurate). Mark Gurman, writing for Boomberg (opens in a new tab), says the 2023 24-inch iMac is in the advanced stages of development. Keeping the same design (including the popular color schemes) as the previous iMac (24-inch, 2021), this new version will apparently get a hardware upgrade, with the 2021 model’s M1 chip upgraded to the M2 – or even the unreleased M3 chip.
According to Gurman, there will also be other internal changes, mainly in the layout of components. While not speculating, it could help improve airflow to keep the new hardware cool.
As I said, everything makes sense. With the last iMac arriving two years ago and the M1 being replaced by the M2, it seems like the right time to update the iMac – especially since Gurman suggests we won’t see a new iMac on the shelves until the second half of this year.
Finally, the Mac Pro may be on its way
Gurman also says that Apple will finally release the new Mac Pro in 2023, and that it will be Apple’s first super-powered workstation to be powered by Apple’s own chips, after parting ways with Intel.
Again, this makes sense as the Mac Pro is one of the few Mac products (along with the 27-inch iMac and iMac Pro) that doesn’t yet have Apple’s new silicon-based version. With the last Mac Pro released in 2019, this is a product that really feels like it could do with an upgrade.
Rumors suggest that it will also feature the extremely powerful M2 Ultra chip with 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores and support for up to 192GB of memory.
We haven’t heard anything about the M2 Ultra chip, but if Apple adopts the same design as the M1 Ultra (which debuted in Mac Studio in 2022), it will likely be two M2 Max chips connected by an ultra-fast connection. they basically form one big, incredibly powerful chip.
I can definitely see it happening and the new Mac Pro would be the perfect product for a chip of this caliber. So far, Gurman’s rumors about Apple’s Mac plans for 2023 sound promising. However, there is also news that I am less happy about…
1 year old MacBook Air? No thanks
According to Gurman, Apple also plans to release not one but two MacBook Air in 2023. This news is more puzzling given that the latest model, the MacBook Air (M2, 2022), is less than a year old and was introduced with a major redesign and new M2 chips.
According to Gurman, Apple will release a new 15-inch MacBook Air this year. While I’m not convinced the larger screen MacBook Air will be something many people are asking for (part of the MacBook Air’s appeal is how thin and light it is, and the larger screen can affect its portability), at least the larger screen model would it from last year’s model.
However, Gurman suggests that there will also be a new 13-inch MacBook Air in 2023, possibly with the M3 chip. This is where I start to worry as such a move would mean switching to Apple’s annual M chip update cycle. The M1 arrived in 2020 and the M2 debuted in 2022, which seemed like a reasonable gap. However, in my experience, the M2 chip didn’t deliver the generational leap that would make people who owned M1-based Macs like the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) feel the need to upgrade, and that’s likely to happen even more in case Apple moves to annual updates.
I understand why Apple might be interested in this. The MacBook Air has been a huge success, and the company has been releasing new, updated iPhones every year for centuries. However, while some people might not mind the idea of their iPhone becoming obsolete after 12 months, a similar timeline might not sit well with MacBook owners.
There will almost certainly be some people who bought the MacBook Air (M2, 2022) who will feel a bit nervous if Apple releases an updated MacBook Air M3 soon, especially if Apple releases it with a flurry of claims about how much better the M3 compares to M2.
This one-year cadence could also affect Apple’s other Macs – as suggested by Gurman, if the M3 launches at WWDC 2023 (a year after the M2’s launch), the M3 Pro and M3 Max will arrive in 2024 with the new MacBook Pros.
This could end up irritating even more people as people invest in top-of-the-line MacBook Pros assuming they’ll stay state of the art for a while. Of course, the release of the M3 powered versions doesn’t mean their M2 purchases will become obsolete, but they probably won’t fare too well either.
So if Apple thinks that because it can release annual updates to its iPhones, it can do the same with MacBooks, I wouldn’t be so sure. I definitely won’t be updating every year, and I also don’t like the feeling that my expensive new MacBook is obsolete after less than a year.