'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean?
ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.
When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.
ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.
Apple, never a company to sit still, looks set to continue to push new Macs powered by updated Apple Silicon chips out of the door over the course of 2022.
We know that an iPhone 14 and an Apple Watch Series 8 are pretty much guaranteed to land this fall, but we're also expecting to see an updated iPad Pro and iPad Air, as well as a whole batch of Macs.
And if you bought a new Mac in the past couple of years, even one powered by Apple Silicon, then get ready for it to start to feel old as Apple pushes out new chips.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, we can expect Macs based on three Apple Silicon lines:
The super-powered M1 Mac chips are likely to be monsters since they will be destined for the Mac Pro and could feature as many as 20 CPU /64 graphics cores and 40 CPU /128 graphics cores. That's a lot of horsepower, but the sort of performance that's expected from a high-end workstation.
My ZDNet colleague David Gewirtz has put together a very compelling concept for an Apple Silicon-powered Mac Pro with as much as 512GB of RAM.
The Mac Pro will be an impressive test of how Apple Silicon can scale to meet high-performance workloads.
In line with other rumors, Gurman is expecting a big Mac update over 2022:
This is a huge overhaul that includes several Macs that have already had the Apple Silicon treatment.
It's quite an aggressive upgrade cycle, and it's clear Apple wants to make the Mac relevant once again.
And we may be seeing the first updated Mac drop as early as March, being unveiled alongside the updated iPhone SE that we're all expecting soon.
With all this in mind, it might be worth holding off making any big Mac purchase outside of the M1 Pro/M1 Max MacBook Pro line until we see what 2022 brings our way.
Buying those first-generation M1 Macs might feel like a bad idea the moment Tim Cook starts pulling out updated Macs left, right, and center.