Apple, on October 30, rolled out new MacBook Pro and iMac computers, and three new chips to power them, with the company saying it had redesigned its graphics processing units, a key part of the chip, which is currently dominated by Nvidia in the market.
The new computers, and the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips were unveiled at the company's online event. The 14-inch MacBook Pro laptop will start at $1,599 and a 16-inch version starts at $2,499. The new iMac desktop with the M3 family of chips starts at $1,299.
Apple has seen a revitalization in its Mac business, roughly doubling its market share to nearly 11 percent since 2020 when it parted ways with Intel and started using its own custom-designed chips as the brains of the machines, according to preliminary data from IDC.
Apple's event was focused on professional users, displaying a new secure screen-sharing feature that would enable professional users to work on their machines from remote locations.
The company's custom chips, which use design technology from Arm Holdings, have given its Macs better battery life and, for some tasks, better performance than machines using Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Apple said the M3 Max chip was aimed at artificial intelligence developers, who need huge amounts of memory to develop chatbots and other models.
Apple's market shakeup has stoked Qualcomm to ramp up its efforts to produce Arm-based chips for Windows. Last week, it revealed plans to roll out a chip that is both faster and more energy-efficient than some Apple offerings. Reuters last week reported that Nvidia also plans to set foot into the PC market as early as 2025.
At Apple, Mac hit $40.18 billion in revenue for its fiscal 2022, or about 11 percent of its revenue. While that was up 14 percent from the previous fiscal year, sales have been sluggish in the current fiscal, along with the rest of the PC industry, which has been hit by the post-pandemic slump.
According to the tech behemoth, the new chips would be the first for laptops and desktops that use 3-nanometer manufacturing technology. This will ensure enhanced performance of the chips for each watt of electricity used.
Though Apple did not reveal the chipmaker, analysts believe it is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, which uses the same technology to make chips for the top-end iPhone 15 models.
Throughout the event, Apple executives compared the performance of the new MacBooks and iMac machines to older Apple machines with chips from Intel, playing up how much speed customers would notice by upgrading to devices with Apple's own chips.
(with agency inputs)
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