Tech
It looks like Apple almost announced a new MacBook Pro at WWDC
The M1X could be coming sooner rather than later.
This year’s iteration of Apple’s WWDC developer conference was all about software improvements. The iPhone maker announced no new hardware to its lineup. Apparently, Apple did at least consider showing off an updated version of the MacBook Pro — enough so that mention of the laptop made its way into the WWDC YouTube video’s metadata.
The keyword tags for that official video include the terms “m1x” and “M1X MacBook Pro,” as spotted by Twitter user Max Balzer (and reported by 9to5Mac). YouTube’s tagging feature is available as part of the video-upload process, allowing the owner to make it easier for it to show up in search results. Which means these tags were added by someone at Apple who uploaded the video.
In the weeks leading up to WWDC, many notable Apple analysts predicted that we’d be seeing the next-gen Apple Silicon MacBook Pro at the big livestreamed conference. Sources claimed the new Pro would arrive sometime this summer, though component shortages could keep them in short supply until 2022.
There’s still plenty of time for Apple to announce a summer release for the M1X MacBook Pro. As of right now, though, there’s still a whole lot of guessing going on.
Could be a fluke — As always, we’re trying not to get too pumped about what boils down to a rumor — an educated guess of a rumor, but a rumor still. There are a few reasons why Apple might’ve added those M1X tags to its video, and not all of them are because it’s planning to release the new MacBook soon.
Tags are one of the easiest ways to boost engagement on a YouTube video as they’re used by YouTube for indexing and search purposes. So it’s possible Apple included the tags as an engagement strategy, in order to pull in as many viewers as possible. This does seem unlikely, given that Apple has plenty of viewers without this kind of engagement hack.
It could also be a genuine mistake. Though this, too, seems unlikely — the WWDC keynote was pre-recorded, so it’s not as if the lineup of announcements changed at the last second.
Ten-core encore — The first round of MacBooks made with Apple’s in-house processing unit has received rave reviews from casual users and laptop fanboys alike. It only makes sense that the next iteration of the MacBook Pro would be even more impressive.
By all accounts, the M1X MacBook Pro is going to be a significant upgrade from the M1. According to a recent report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the new Pro will include eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores, for a total of ten (ten!) cores. And they will finally (maybe) nix the Thunderbolt-only design in favor of one with an SD card port and an HDMI port.
Did Apple plan to announce the M1X at WWDC and later pull it (perhaps due to the aforementioned supply shortages)? We’ll probably never know. But it is looking a lot like the M1X is nearing the horizon. Time to start saving up — it’s not going to be cheap.
