Mac Trade-In Changes May Indicate New Model to Launch This Month
Apple may be proceeding with plans to announce a new Mac model this month, according to related information obtained by MacRumors.
Details pertaining to upcoming changes to Mac trade-ins provided to MacRumors by a verified source suggest that Apple will begin accepting new models for trade-in this month. The models in question are current-generation devices, suggesting that successors could be announced in a matter of weeks.
Similar changes in June coincided with WWDC, when Apple began accepting trade-ins of the Mac Studio, 13-inch M2 MacBook Air, and 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro for credit towards new Apple product purchases. Apple simultaneously launched the 15-inch MacBook Air, second-generation Mac Studio, and Apple silicon Mac Pro. As such, it seems plausible that a similar, albeit smaller, expansion of the Macs Apple accepts for trade-in this month correlates with the launch of at least one new machine.
In July, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said October of this year could see the announcement of the first Macs with the M3 chip. He said that the 13-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and 24-inch iMac are all candidates for potential release this month.
The as-yet-unannounced M3 chip is widely expected to be fabricated with TSMC's 3nm process for performance and power efficiency improvements compared to the current 5nm-based M2 chip, which debuted in June 2022. It will also likely feature an all new GPU with hardware ray-tracing, first introduced on the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip last month.
In September, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that it seemed Apple will not launch new MacBook models with M3 series chips before the end of this year. This may mean that the most likely Mac to be announced is a refreshed 24-inch iMac with the M3 chip. The current model featuring the M1 chip has now been on sale for over two and a half years.
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