What to expect from Apple’s ‘week’ of Mac announcements

Another round of Apple devices is about to arrive. After launching new iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods in September and a new iPad earlier this month, Apple is now gearing up to launch updated Macs. After weeks of rumors and speculation, Apple SVP Greg Joswiak came out and directly teased the arrival of new computers to be announced during the final week of October.

We're expecting a fresh round of chip upgrades, at least one redesign, and maybe an October surprise or two (the good kind). Since there was no hyped-up save-the-date sent out for an in-person or livestream event, we're expecting a series of early morning press releases - in the past, Apple has tended to drop them around 9AM ET.

Joswiak's teaser mentioned a "week" of announcements, so nobody knows for certain right now if the news will be spread out over several days or if we're going to be inundated by a mountain of Macs on Monday morning. Regardless of how it happens, here's what we think will get updated and what might not make the cut.

Apple Intelligence will finally (start to) launch

Apple Intelligence is set to launch "this fall" across compatible iPhones, iPads, and Macs, with the first features arriving in October. The end of October has nearly arrived, and Apple has confirmed it's coming some time next week.

First up, we're expecting Apple's Writing Tools for rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing, plus a newly designed Siri, new Photos app features such as Clean Up (akin to Google's Magic Eraser), and live transcriptions of phone calls and voice memos. Other features like ChatGPT search integrations, Genmoji custom emoji, Image Playground generative art, and Visual Intelligence image searching are expected to "roll out later this year and in the months following," according to Apple.

We first saw these features demoed back at WWDC 2024, but so far, you've had to install one of Apple's developer or public betas to experience them. For iPhones, the features are coming to the 15 Pro / Pro Max and the whole iPhone 16 line. On iPads and Macs, Apple Intelligence will launch on models with M1-generation processors or newer.