Apple Introduces New Macs Featuring Updated Processors and Prices
On Monday, Apple unveiled new MacBook Pro and iMac computers along with three fresh chips to fuel their performance. The company announced a significant redesign of its graphics processing units (GPU), a crucial component of the chip that Nvidia currently dominates in the market.
The new computers and the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips were unveiled at an online event that focused heavily on professional users.
In the US, the 14-inch MacBook Pro laptop starts at $1,599, and the 16-inch version starts at $2,499. The new iMac desktop with the M3 chip family starts at $1,299. Some will be available next week, while others won’t ship until later in November.
Apple has revived its Mac business, roughly doubling its market share to nearly 11 percent since 2020, according to preliminary data from IDC, after it parted ways with Intel and began using its own custom chips to power the machines’ brains.
As part of its focus on business users, on Monday it introduced a new secure screen sharing feature that allows them to access their machines remotely.
The company’s custom chips, which use Arm Holdings’ design technology, have given Macs better battery life and, in some tasks, better performance than machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Unlike other laptop makers that might combine an Intel central processing unit (CPU) with an Nvidia GPU, Apple has combined both parts in its Apple silicon chips, which the company says offers better performance than its competitors.
Apple’s market shift has prompted Qualcomm to redouble its efforts to make Arm-based chips for Windows, and last week it announced plans to release a chip that is both faster and more energy efficient than some Apple offerings. Reuters reported last week that Nvidia plans to jump into the PC market as early as 2025.
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Apple aimed the new machines squarely at designers, musicians and software developers, at one point stressing that the way it uses memory can be used by AI researchers, whose chatbots and other creations are often limited by how much data can be stored inside a computer. memory.
Apple also reshaped its overall computer lineup in ways that could change the behavior of business buyers.
While the U.S. price of the new 14-inch MacBook Pro dropped from $1,999 to $1,599, Apple appeared to have eliminated the cheaper $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro model that was a big seller for businesses, CEO Ben Bajarin said. Analyst at Creative Strategies.
The move is likely to clarify the choice between the company’s model lines, creating a choice between Apple’s productivity-oriented MacBook Air models, which top out at $1,299, or the MacBook Pro models’ new starting price of $1,599.
Apple’s Mac revenue in 2022 was $40.18 billion, or about 11 percent of its revenue. Although it was up 14% from the previous fiscal year, sales this year have slowed along with the rest of the PC industry, which has suffered from the post-pandemic slump.
Apple said the new chips are the first for laptops and desktops to use 3-nanometer manufacturing technology, which gives the chips better performance for every watt of electricity used.
Apple did not name who makes the chips, but analysts believe it is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, which uses the same technology to make chips for the high-end iPhone 15 models.
Throughout the event, Apple executives compared the performance of the new MacBooks and iMacs to older Apple machines with Intel chips, and talked about how much faster customers are seeing when they upgrade to devices with Apple’s own chips.
