Apple is partway through the process of moving all its Mac computers to its own Apple Silicon chips. Now, one report says the company could complete the entire transition “as early as June at WWDC 2022.”
The claim was made by reporter Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter. WWDC is Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, a show where the company often reveals upcoming hardware products. In fact, it was at WWDC that Apple first announced the Apple Silicon project in June 2020, so it would be a fitting event to declare the transition complete.
So far, Apple has launched Apple Silicon chips in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and the 24-inch iMac. That leaves a few Macs yet to completely make the switch: Apple still sells Intel-based versions of the Mac Mini, the Mac Pro, and the larger iMac (which could turn out to be a resurrected iMac Pro).
Gurman’s newsletter adds that the chip inside the upcoming Mac Pro will be smaller than the current model and will have up to 40 CPU cores and up to 128 GPU cores, two things he has claimed in the past. This chip will be based on the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips in the latest MacBook Pro, rather than the new M2 we expect to see in this year’s MacBook Air refresh.
Since posting his newsletter, Gurman has clarified on Twitter that he expects an Apple Silicon-equipped Mac Pro will be announced at WWDC, but that it will not actually launch until later in the year. It’s not yet clear if the same will be true for the Mac Mini and larger iMac or whether they will instead be officially launched at the show.
Gurman touched on a variety of other Mac subjects in his newsletter, too. For one thing, he warned readers not to get too excited over Apple’s future M2 chip, which he believes will be “marginally faster” than the M1 chip that launched in 2020, with the same CPU core counts but a slightly improved GPU with nine or ten cores. The M1 chip still performs admirably in 2022, so the small increase is not necessarily a bad thing, but don’t expect the M2 to perform miracles. Indeed, Gurman advises readers to see it similarly to the chip updates the iPhone gets every year.
Also discussed was the rumored external monitor that Apple is said to be working on. In December 2021, Gurman reported Apple was working on a display that could cost half the price of the $4,999 Apple Pro Display XDR. In his newsletter, Gurman reiterates that idea, saying he is hopeful it will be launched in 2022.
All that being said, it’s notable that Gurman says these launches could happen “as early as June,” implying they could happen later. Yet even if some are delayed until the end of the year, 2022 could still be a jam-packed year for Apple — and a great one indeed for Apple users.
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