Laptops

According to a new report from Apple insider and Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, the next generation of Apple's MacBook Pro is going to skip a redesign, and the following generation will be what Apple completely overhauls.

The news comes from Gurman's weekly Power On newsletter, where he wrote that Apple isn't likely to completely overhaul or redesign the MacBook Pro until 2026 and that Apple's original plan was to introduce a redesigned MacBook Pro in 2025, but that plan was blundered by delays related to display technology, presumably OLED display technology as rumors indicate that is what Apple is planning to adopt for its MacBook Pro, falling right in line with the new M4 iPad Pros.

Gurman also writes that the new MacBook Pro will have a "thinner design," and the decision to go thicker with the introduction of the M-series chips with the M1 has now been reversed. Apple wants thinner laptops, even if they are MacBook Pro models, which typically call for a thicker design to fit a bigger battery and more powerful components that require larger cooling solutions to run optimally. Hopefully, the rumored reduction in thickness doesn't come with any concessions.

Apple sprang a trio of new M4 Macs on us this week, just as rumored, but the firm has also stealthily upgraded the current MacBook Air models in the background - now equipping them with 16GB of RAM as a base loadout.

As you probably haven't missed, all the Macs revealed this week - first we saw the iMac M4, then the Mac mini M4, and finally MacBook Pro M4 models - have 16GB of RAM at the entry-level, and Apple didn't hike the starting price because of this either (thankfully).

So, it makes some sense that Apple would apply the same treatment to the MacBook Air M3 (and M2), and indeed all these laptops now come with 16GB as a minimum, with the price sticking at the same level.

Apple just took off the wraps from new MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models with the M4 chip, which can pack an even faster SoC than we've already seen - namely the M4 Max - plus a move has been made to a minimum of 16GB of RAM with the 14-inch flavor of the laptop (finally).

All of this was rumored - indeed Apple itself accidentally leaked the M4 Max yesterday, via its own website - and the 16GB of Unified Memory for the entry-level MacBook Pro 14-inch with M4 is, of course, very welcome.

The good news is that there's no price hike with the move to 16GB on that base MacBook Pro 14-inch, with Apple maintaining the MSRP at $1,599.

CES 2025 is right around the corner and we're going to be flooded with next-gen gaming laptops powered by NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 50 series Laptop GPUs... but older-generation AMD and Intel CPUs.

In a new post on Weibo by leaker "Golden Pig Upgrade" we're learning that CES 2025 will deliver a wave of next-gen RTX 50 Laptop GPUs inside of new gaming laptops, but they'll be powered mostly by older-generation AMD and Intel processors. Intel will use its 14th Gen Core-HX "Raptor Lake Refresh" CPUs + RTX 50 Laptop GPUs while AMD will use its Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" CPUs + RTX 50 Laptop GPUs.

Golden Pig Upgrade writes: "It is predicted that the notebook platform combination next year will be mainly N-1 or even N-2 generation GPU + 50 series. If Intel wants to stop the 13th generation HX, then 14650HX + 50 series will be the main force. AMD has Zen4 + 50 series. It is becoming more and more difficult to launch new CPU products economically. The notebook CPU product position should be readjusted in the future. At least the desktop U should be the last generation, but that will be in 2027".

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU is rumored to be 45% to 65% faster than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU according to new leaks.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, sources told him that the GB203 GPU that will find its way into the GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU should feature 8000+ CUDA cores and 16GB of next-gen GDDR7 memory. Don't worry, that's not the fastest mobile Blackwell GPU... that'd be the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU that should rock (an insane) 24GB of GDDR7.

The purported RTX 5080 Laptop GPU being leaked here is based on a heavily cut-down GB203 GPU, but MLID expects the RTX 5080 Laptop GPU to be "way stronger" than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU. We're looking at the next-gen RTX 5080 Laptop GPU being 45% to 65% faster than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU, which is a huge deal for 2025 gaming laptops.

ORIGIN PC has just unveiled its new custom high-performance workstation laptops with the introduction of the NSL-14 and NSL-16 laptops, both powered by Intel's new Core Ultra 7 processor.

Inside, both the ORIGIN PC NSL-14 and NSL-16 workstation laptops feature the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with 8 cores and 8 threads @ up to 4.8GHz (no Hyper-Threading here). There's up to 32GB of LPDDR5X memory inside, and up to 8TB of Gen4 SSD goodness in the NSL-14, while the bigger NSL-16 can handle up to 16TB of SSD storage.

The ORIGIN PC NSL-14 features a 14-inch 1200p (1920 x 1200) resolution display at only 60Hz (a huge downside, even though it's a workstation laptop, 120Hz would've been nice to see) while the NSL-16 features a bigger 16-inch display at 1600p (2560 x 1600) and a smoother 144Hz refresh rate.

Apple will be unveiling its new M4 family of processors later this month, with the introduction of new MacBook Pro laptops powered by the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max SoCs that are all fabbed by TSMC on its new 3nm process node.

Apple will host an event later this month unveiling the new M4 MacBook Pro, M4 Pro MacBook Pro, and M4 Max MacBook Pro, with UDN reporting that we can expect 16GB of RAM across the board with the new M4 MacBook Pros, up from the 8GB in the M3 MacBook Pro laptops.

TSMC is said to benefit greatly from this, as it has been doing from Apple, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and so many other companies that have their most advanced chips fabbed by the Taiwan semiconductor leader. Apple is expected to unveil its new M4 processors inside of new MacBook Pros, a new Mac mini, new iMacs, and an iPad mini 7 and then launch on November 1.

Microsoft plans to launch Surface devices with Intel's new Lunar Lake mobile chips. As seen on Reddit (thanks, Windows Central), a Surface Laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V processor went up for sale on the Chinese eBay-like website Goofish. The listing even stated that the laptop won't officially be available for purchase until 2025.

Microsoft's new Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 launched earlier this year exclusively with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips, marking the arrival of Copilot+ PCs with Windows on Arm tech instead of traditional x86 hardware.

With Microsoft mandating a minimum of 40+ TOPS of AI performance to be compatible with Copilot+ AI features, Lunar Lake is Intel's first mobile architecture that meets this requirement. This new mysterious Surface Laptop could be the current Surface Laptop 7 with Intel Lunar Lake or a Surface Laptop 8 refresh on track for next year.

It was only yesterday that publications began reporting on a Russian YouTube channel that posted a video of what the YouTubers claimed to be, and it certainly appeared to be upon a watch, an unboxing of an unreleased M4 MacBook Pro.

The news was shared by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, a known and credible Apple insider. Gurman wrote the M4 MacBook Pro, which is scheduled to be announced by Apple at the end of October, appeared to be real, and while it remains unconfirmed, the model, unboxing, and displayed specifications line up with previous information. Gurman also pointed out that this could be Apple's first full retail leak, which is when a full retail device, not a prototype, is leaked from a factory line or Apple internally to the public before an announcement was even made.

To add more credibility to the legitimacy of the M4 MacBook Pro, it now appears it's being sold on a Russian classified ads site. As you can imagine, the price of the M4 MacBook Pro is incredibly inflated, and judging from the listing, it appears the laptop is the base model with a 14-inch display, 16GB of unified memory, a 512GB SSD, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and the M4 Chip with its 10 CPU cores.

Apple is rumored to be on the verge of releasing its new M4 MacBook Pro line-up, with industry insider and Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman recently teasing that Apple will announce the first Macs with M4 chips sometime in late October.

However, it appears that an M4 MacBook Pro has already made it out into the wild, and while I cannot confirm the authenticity of the supposed leak, and neither can other publications, it appears to be very real. Gurman wrote in an X post the complete unboxing of an M4 MacBook Pro by a Russian YouTube channel, Wylsacom, "looks fairly legitimate" and, if it is real, would mark the first time a full retail Apple device has leaked weeks in advance.

14-inch MacBook Pro specifications: According to the video, the M4 chip will increase performance by 25%, and according to the alleged Geekbench result, the M4 chip features 10 CPU cores, which is an increase of two compared to the M3's 8-core CPU. To further back this specification up is the release of the M4 chip within the new iPad Pro that was released in May, as that chip is confirmed to have a 10-core CPU. As for RAM, the 14-inch MacBook Pro comes with 16GB of memory.