Andrew Cunningham
Apple's new iPhone and Apple Watch won't arrive until later this week, but the rumor mill is already indicating that Apple is planning to announce some products in October that weren't mentioned at the iPhone event. Apple scheduled its release calendar similarly last year, when it announced and released the new iPhone in September and then launched the first wave of M3 Macs around Halloween.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes the event will focus primarily on the first wave of Macs with M4 processors, following the introduction of the standard M4 in the iPad Pro earlier this year. As he has previously reported, he expects new MacBook Pro models with the M4 and “pro-level M4 chip options,” possibly the M4 Pro and M4 Max. He also expects an M4 version of the 24-inch iMac.
But the most interesting of the new Macs will still be the redesigned Mac mini, which hasn't received an M3 update at all and has been using the same basic exterior design since 2010. This Mac mini is said to be closer in size to the Apple TV than the current mini, but still uses an internal power supply so owners don't have to deal with a power brick. At least some of the ports on the current device will be replaced with USB-C and/or Thunderbolt ports, something that MacRumors confirmed earlier today when they found a reference to an “Apple Silicon Mac mini (5 ports)” in an Apple software update (some of those ports are reportedly on the front of the device, a nice Mac Studio design upgrade I'd like to see on the new Mac mini).
The “five port” description implies there will be another model with more or fewer ports – Apple used similar terminology to differentiate two- and four-port versions of some MacBook Pro models back in the Intel days. The current M2 Mac mini model has fewer ports than models with the M2 Pro chip, because the more powerful processor also has more I/O capabilities – assuming we get a Mac mini with the M4 and an upgraded model with the M4 Pro, we'd expect the Pro version to have more ports.
Gurman says other Mac models, including the Mac Studio, Mac Pro, and MacBook Air, will see M4-series updates during 2025. Of those, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro have gone without an update the longest — they're all still using M2-series chips.
Apple is said to be planning some new low-end iPads for the October event — this isn't the first time Macs and iPads have shared billing for one of these late-fall product announcements. Both the $349 iPad 10 and iPad mini have gone over a year without any kind of hardware update; it seems likely that both will get new chips, even if the design isn't changed much.