Inbound M4 Mac updates rumored to arrive as early as October 28

AppleInsider said:

Given that Apple generally likes to announce new hardware at about 9AM ET, we're guessing October 29. Furthermore, Apple has a history of preferring to hold events and product launches on a Tuesday, making that the most likely day for hardware introductions.

It is still unclear whether Apple will hold an actual event for the Mac launches, or will proceed with a press release-based introduction.

Not true at all. Press release-only announcements might drop at 9:00, at market open on the east coast, but Apple events always start at 1:00pm eastern time.

Apple live events usually start at 1pm ET but not always.

That said when an event has a live component Apple typically sends the invitation email in advance to give people time to book travel. Since the pandemic Apple has leaned to giving two weeks notice. Prior to the pandemic it was typically one week.

We are already past the moment when Apple would normally would send out an e-mail for a hosted live event. In my opinion this points to a likely press release-only launch.

Tech media has been speculating on an October event for months and now with each passing day the likelihood of a live hosted event drops. If they intended on hosting an event with hands-on demo session after a launch video on Tuesday the 29th, the e-mail invitations would have gone out on the 15th.

Since iOS 18.1 and Sequoia 15.1 are slated to release on Monday the 28th it would make sense for Apple to close the Store early Tuesday morning, drop some press releases and reopen the Store with the newly announced products.

I'm thinking it's possible the iMac may be refreshed too. Many of the configurations and colors (other than silver) have lead times that are 2-6 weeks out.

I wonder what the odds are on them releasing a real Apple Silicon Mac Pro with an M4 Extreme (of whatever they end up calling it) configuration.

saarek said:

I wonder what the odds are on them releasing a real Apple Silicon Mac Pro with an M4 Extreme (of whatever the end up calling it) configuration.

In 2024? About 0.1%, maybe less.

In 2025? Higher chance as long as they don't discontinue the Mac Pro product. With Apple Silicon there are no discrete GPU add-in cards so the spaciousness and capacity of the Mac Pro chassis is largely useless.

There aren't many usage cases that favor a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio at this point. If they can put an M-series Max or Ultra SoC in the Studio, that's probably covers over 95% of their high-end market. Note that there have been no credible rumors about the impending release of M4 Max or Ultra silicon. We're probably still 6-9 months away from that. You can look forward to it when the rumor mill starts churning out speculation but we haven't see any of that.

Heck, we haven't seen any M4 Macs yet with vanilla or Pro chips let alone the higher-end silicon. One thing that's clear, Apple Engineering doesn't have the bandwidth to push out all four M-series chip variants at the same time.