Apple teases “week of announcements” about the Mac starting on Monday

Apple has released new iPhones, new Apple Watches, a new iPad mini, and a flotilla of software updates this fall, but Mac hardware has gone unmentioned so far. That’s set to change next week, according to an uncharacteristically un-cryptic post from Apple Worldwide Marketing SVP Greg Joswiak earlier today.

Imploring readers to “Mac [sic] their calendars,” Joswiak’s post teases “an exciting week of announcements ahead, starting on Monday morning.” If the wordplay wasn’t enough, an attached teaser video with a winking neon Mac logo drives the point home.

Though Joswiak’s post was light on additional details, months of reliable rumors have told us the most likely things to expect: refreshed MacBook Pros and 24-inch iMacs with few if any external changes but new Apple M4-series chips on the inside, plus a new M4 Mac mini with a substantial design overhaul. The MacBook Pros and iMacs were refreshed with M3 chips almost exactly a year ago, but the Mac mini was last updated with the M2 in early 2023.

The new Mac mini will allegedly be closer in size to an Apple TV and is said to be slightly taller than current Mac minis but with a smaller footprint. The new design will continue to include a space-saving internal power supply rather than relying on an external power brick, but it will also rely more heavily on USB-C/Thunderbolt ports to save space, cutting down on the number of other ports. At least some models will also include USB-C ports on the front, a design change inherited from the Mac Studio.

Apple’s M4 has been shipping for months, but it debuted in the iPad Pro, not in a Mac. It’s the first time since the Mac switched to Apple Silicon that a new M-series chip had launched in anything other than a Mac.

We already have some idea of how the M4 will perform from the iPad Pro—in our tests comparing an M3 MacBook Air to the M4 iPad Pro, we found roughly 20 percent faster CPU performance and 13 percent faster GPU performance. But M4 chips in any MacBook Pro or Mac mini will likely have active cooling fans and more substantial heatsinks, which could improve performance for some tasks. And any M4 Pro, Max, or Ultra chips that Apple releases will include more CPU and GPU cores than the regular M4, boosting performance even further.

The new Macs will likely launch alongside the first wave of Apple Intelligence features in macOS Sequoia; Apple published release candidate builds of the iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 updates to developers earlier this week. These updates include notification summaries and some tools for automating responses to emails and texts. The company also released the first preview builds for the iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2 updates this week, which include most of the promised image-generation features. Apple Intelligence features are only supported on very recent iPhones—either the iPhone 15 Pro, the iPhone 16, or the iPhone 16 Pro—but they’ll run on all Apple Silicon Macs going all the way back to the 2020 M1 MacBook Air and Mac mini.