During its “Scary Fast” announcement event on Monday night, Apple AAPL, +0.28% took to the internet to announce a string of new MacBook Pro laptops and a new family of chips to power them. The event itself happened at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, during both the World Series and Monday Night Football — odd timing for a company that is targeting mass consumer audiences for its messages.
There are other differences between the chips including maximum system memory capacity, how many external displays are supported . All of them share the same 16-core NPU for AI computing. The opening to the event did showcase a lot of Mac users “doing work” but there was no discussion about anything new or drastically improved. And throughout the announcement we saw a number of quick jump cuts between applications, but no focus or emphasis.
It’s for these reasons that I believe the door is still wide open for competition from the PC space to gain back some of the Apple Mac market share and mindshare. New chips from Qualcomm QCOM, +1.08%, AMD AMD, +2.41%, and Intel INTC, +2.27% are coming. Qualcomm’s recent Snapdragon X Elite announcement, for example, was all about AI, huge CPU performance claims, and bringing Apple-like battery life to Windows in 2024.