A few hours before the “Unleashed” event, the rumor counter is going wild. Mark Gurman, in his newsletter Sunday, outlines what to expect, ie two 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros with mini-LED screens, like on the latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro. It also confirms the definitions of the new panels: 3024 x 1964 and 3456 x 2234 pixels (against 2560 x 1600 and 3072 x 1920 pixels on the current 13 and 16 inches).
The MagSafe port should indeed make a comeback on these machines, after the 24-inch iMac. Apple would also have tested the integration of HDMI ports and an SD card reader, which could therefore be found on these MacBooks. The manufacturer would have even revolved around the idea of a USB-A port (!), But a priori it will not come back to new computers, just like the Touch Bar which we feel is the end of the part.
The leak specialist Bloomberg indicates once again that these models will ship a processor with 10 cores (8 efficient, 2 economical), while we will have the choice between a graphics circuit with 16 or 32 cores. On the RAM side, these computers should be able to support 32 or 64 GB of RAM, compared to the 16 GB maximum of M1 Macs.
Apple could give different names to its future chip depending on its graphics capacity: M1X (16 cores) and M1Z (32 cores), like the chip that equips the iPad Pro 2020 (A12Z, which had the same CPU than the A12X but better GPU). Gurman has heard the words “M1 Pro” and “M1 Max”, so we get a bit of guesswork.
The conjectures, they are also completely lost with this rumor which has circulated since the beginning of the weekend, namely that these MacBook Pro would present… a notch. A Chinese leaker picked up by @DuanRui shows an image of what is supposedly the computer cover and there is indeed a notch in it.
This would contain a 1080p webcam, a True Tone sensor and a microphone, but no Face ID! Touch ID would stay in place. Maybe this notch is necessary to have reduced borders?