Apple’s latest event, dubbed Unleashed, airs today at 6 PM GMT, and for our American friends, airs at 1 PM ET and 10 AM PDT. It’ll be streaming live on YouTube, Apple TV, and Apple.com, or you can watch it right here via the embedded stream:
Apple’s last event brought with it their refresh of iPads, including the redesigned Mini and the iPhone 13, as well as its permeations. However what was missing was the hotly rumored Airpods 3, which seemed weird to leave out for an event so tied with the main devices that use them.
Airpods 3 are expected to make an appearance at the event, alongside the more intriguing updates to the new line of M1 Macs that launched last year.
The M1 chip is Apple’s ARM-based CPU, as they have now ditched Intel almost entirely aside from their higher tier MacBooks, which are presumed to be getting a full refresh including a new 14-inch model for the Pro end of things. The MacBook Pro 13″ got a new revision last year and was seen to have a singular core extra over the Air, putting them almost neck-and-neck with each other in performance, so these next ones should hopefully come equipped with an X variant on the M1 chip.
Bloomberg’s resident Apple leaker, Mark Gurman, has noted that via a developer at Apple has told him the names of the chips are currently “M1 Pro” and “M1 Max”, but also that they could just ditch those names entirely and use the usual X that has been appended to every chip they’ve made since the A-series that lives in iPads and iPhones.
Outside of new laptops, the Mac Mini is also due an update – slightly. See, the M1 chips have more than proven their weight for basic – up to – 4K editing and extensive photo editing sessions, but they lack the real oomph to really drag along the more intensive graphical tasks required by After Effects and Resolve. Once you start throwing graphics in, they begin to show their limitations.
So an updated Mac Mini or even Mac Pro with a fatter M1X chip inside would probably go down an absolute treat.
You can keep tabs on what’s been announced via our news feed.
