Laptops News - Page 8

Apple finally announced the M3 series of chips during its big 'Scary Fast' Mac event earlier this week and with three chips coming in two different MacBook Pros, there is no shortage of options. But at the very top of the lineup is the new M3 Max and early benchmarks show that it's going to be a bit of a beast.

While Apple chose to compare the new M3 series of chips to their M1 counterparts or the even older Intel silicon, it turns out that the M3 Max is going to be able to more than compete with the very best that Apple had to offer previously. That chip, the M2 Ultra, is currently sold in the Mac Studio and Mac Pro and will surely be replaced by an M3 Ultra eventually. But given the figures the M3 Max is posting, that M3 Ultra is sure to be quite the performance boss when it does finally arrive.

The early benchmarks were first reported by AppleInsider and appear to show a machine running through Benchmark's tests under the identifier of Mac15,3. That's the 15-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Max inside, so it sits right at the top of Apple's laptop lineup. And the scores are mightily impressive. The single-core score for the M3 Max is 2,971 and the multi-core score is 20,785 which doesn't mean all that much in isolation. So what about that M2 Ultra?

Intel has reportedly left its OEM partners "royally pissed" after major delays to its new Meteor Lake platform. Coincidentally, the company just announced its new AI Everywhere event for December 14, where it will not only introduce its newly-rebranded Core Ultra CPUs, but also the new Meteor Lake CPUs that will have some tricks -- namely AI -- up its sleeve.

In a new video, leaker Moore's Law is Dead had a bunch to reveal about AMD's new Zen 5-based APU launching in 2025, but also had some news regarding Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs and that their delay has left OEMs "royally pissed". MLID said that OEMs aren't happy because they don't have Meteor Lake laptops ready for the holiday season, and now they've resorted to buying the competitors' processors inside of different laptops.

This means Intel OEMs are now "rushing to buy as much" Phoenix and Rembrandt-R powered laptops, which they were NOT going to do if Intel had Meteor Lake on the market already. The launch event for Meteor Lake happening on December 14, which means we won't have Meteor Lake laptops until the first few weeks of January 2024.

Lenovo seems to be the first partner with Intel's newly-named Core Ultra CPU series, with their new Lenovo Yoga laptops featuring the new Meteor Lake processors from Intel.

The more expensive Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 powered by the Intel Core Ultra 7155H processor costs around $1595, with the CPU packing 6 P-Cores, 8 E-Cores, and 2 LP-Cores with a total of 16 cores and 22 threads of Meteor Lake CPU power that will clock up to 4.8GHz. We have a 14.5-inch 3K 120Hz display, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB PCIe M.2 NVMe SSD filling out the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 laptop.

Lenovo also has another model of its Yoga Pro 7 system, with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H processor, which features 4 P-Cores, 8 E-Cores, and 2 LP-Cores for a total of 14 cores and 18 threads of Meteor Lake CPU power. This model costs around $1396 and features the same 14.5-inch 3K 120Hz display, 32GB of DDR5, and 1TB SSD.

Apple has just announced its new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops, powered by its new M3 chips, and now Apple has officially broken up with the Touch Bar with its new MacBook Pro models.

The big new part of the new MacBook Pro laptops is definitely Apple's new M3 chip, which is made by TSMC on its fresh new 3nm process node, but in typical Apple fashion, the company has revealed M3 performance stats against the first-gen M1 chip. So, that's ridiculous... given we won't know exactly how good the M3, M3 Pro, or M3 Max are against the M2 chips.

What we do know: Apple's new M3-powered MacBook Pro will start at $1599, with only 8GB of RAM in its base form, which means you're looking at a $300 premium over the M2-powered MacBook Pro. After that, there's the new higher-end M3 Pro-powered 14-inch MacBook Pro that starts at $1999 and M3 Max-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro, which will start at $2499.

ASUS is cooking a monster new gaming laptop with a tease of the ROG Strix Scar 16 gaming laptop, featuring Intel's new 14th Gen Core "Raptor Lake Refresh" CPU and NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, as well as so, so much more.

Inside, the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 16 gaming laptop rocks the flagship Core i9-14900HX processor, but we don't know the boost CPU clock speeds to expect from the Raptor Lake Refresh mobile CPU. If we compare it to the previous-gen Core i9-13900HX processor, which features 24 cores and 32 threads (with 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores) with 36MB of L3 cache. The Core i9-13900HX boosts at up to 5.4GHz, while the Core i9-13980HX (which is a faster chip) at up to 5.6GHz through Thermal Velocity Boost. It would be truly wicked to see 6.0GHz out of the Core i9-14900HX (or maybe the Core i9-14980HX in the future).

On the GPU side of things, we've got NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, what should be a beautiful 1600p resolution (1600p is a really nice step up from 1440p) at 240Hz. The GPU will be able to handle the resolution + high refresh rate without a problem.

Apple announced earlier this week that it will hold a special streamed event on Monday, October 30, and with that day almost here, we think we know exactly what the company will unveil.

We've been hearing rumors of new Apple Mac laptops for months now, and it now looks increasingly likely that they will be with us within a day or so. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that there are a couple of new laptops on the way, while a refresh of an iconic desktop Mac also appears to be in the cards.

Writing in a post on the Bloomberg website, Gurman reports that Apple will launch multiple Macs powered by an all-new M3 family of chips.

Apple has started to send out free gift boxes to some influencers with HomePods and sweet treats all designed to help build the excitement for the upcoming 'Scary Fast' event that will take place on Monday.

The event is set to kick off at 5 PM Pacific Time on Monday, October 30. And while Apple hasn't yet confirmed what it will announce at that event, the expectation is that there will be some new Macs shown off for the first time.

However, this care package sent to influencers including Lamarr Wilson includes AirPods Max with a note that suggests that the aim so to make their experience of the streamed event "more 'spatial'" which might suggest that there will be some sort of audio component to the event itself.

Apple has already confirmed that it will be holding its 'Scary Fast' event on Monday but it hasn't yet said exactly what it intends to show off. It's pretty clear that there is going to be at least one Mac given its debut after people found a stylized Finder icon on the event's webpage on the Apple website. But which Macs, and what else might Apple be ready to show off?

There have been a lot of rumors about Apple's plans but it's now clear that there will be some devices missing from the big unveiling next week. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is normally very well connected with people familiar with Apple's plans. Now, he's had his say on what will be unveiled at Monday's event.

Writing on the Bloomberg website Gurman says that while Apple is working on a 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 chip inside, that machine is unlikely to make an appearance on Monday. the same can also be said for M3 versions of the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs as well, leaving people to wait until 2024 for those machines.

If you've ever looked at Apple's laptop lineup and wished that there was something cheaper to choose from, you might be in luck. Rumors of Apple working on a more affordable laptop have bubbled up here and there of late, and now they're back once again.

This time it's the well-connected and well-known supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who has mentioned the unconfirmed laptop, with the suggestion being that Apple could choose to add it to the mix in an attempt to drive sales that have so far been disappointing.

There have previously been claims that Apple intends to introduce a cheaper MacBook that will go head-to-head with Chromebooks, especially in the educational market. However, that isn't the tact that Kup goes with, saying that Apple might instead choose the cheaper route in an attempt to simply drive sales. It's thought that Apple is still deciding on whether to move forward with the laptop, but if it does it will be part of a larger push to try and increase sales that will include the launch of new M3-powered machines.

Apple has already confirmed that it will be holding an online virtual keynote on October 30, with everything now very much expecting the company to announce a number of new Macs. Those Macs are expected to include both desktop and laptop machines, but you likely won't be able to buy them immediately. That's the norm, but when should you expect to be able to pick up the new hardware?

That's something that we would normally have to wait for the event to find out, but a new MacRumors report claims to have the answers ahead of time. That report doesn't say where the information came from, but ti does claim that the new hardware will go on sale on November 8.

That's a mid-week date, which is odd for Apple. Normally it would make new products available on the Friday, but it now seems that it is aiming for a Wednesday this time out for reasons unknown.