Apple event to bring three Macs with new chips, rumours suggest, with radical redesign to follow

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Apple is preparing three new Macs as part of the transition to its own chips that will be announced at its major event next week, according to a new report.

The company will update its 13-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro so that they use “Apple Silicon” chips.

Those chips – designed by Apple, rather than using the Intel chips that have powered Macs for years – will enable increased performance and battery life, Apple said when it announced the change over summer.

But the majority of changes are expected to be on the inside.

The outside of the new computers will be little changed from their current design, according to the new report from Bloomberg.

More radical redesigns are then expected to follow next year. Bloomberg reported that Apple is working on a redesigned iMac and a new Mac Pro, which will be about half the size of the current computer.

The choice of laptops for the first Apple Silicon computers is likely to be a result of the fact that the main advantages of the new chips – improved battery performance and smaller designs – would be less valuable on the more high-powered desktop computers.

It is not clear when those computers will arrive. But when Apple announced the new chips, it said the first computers using them would arrive by the end of the year, and that the transition to its own silicon would be complete within two years.

The first round of computers is expected to use something similar to the A14 processors that are inside Apple’s new iPhone 12 and iPad Air, the report claimed. While they will use the same architecture, they will be optimised to make use of the extra thermal headroom and battery capabilities inside a laptop.

It is not clear whether the new laptops will immediately replace the existing Intel MacBooks, or if those models will remain on sale. Apple said when it announced the switchover that there would still be new laptops using the Intel chips.

The event – named “One More Thing” and due to happen on 10 November – will also probably see the announcement of the release date of Apple’s new Big Sur operating system, which will be required for the new chips.