Apple Revamps Mac Lineup and Pricing with New Family of Chips 

This photo taken on October 30, 2023 shows people visiting an Apple store in Shenyang, in China's northeastern Liaoning province. (AFP)
This photo taken on October 30, 2023 shows people visiting an Apple store in Shenyang, in China's northeastern Liaoning province. (AFP)
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Apple Revamps Mac Lineup and Pricing with New Family of Chips 

This photo taken on October 30, 2023 shows people visiting an Apple store in Shenyang, in China's northeastern Liaoning province. (AFP)
This photo taken on October 30, 2023 shows people visiting an Apple store in Shenyang, in China's northeastern Liaoning province. (AFP)

Apple on Monday introduced new MacBook Pro and iMac computers and three new chips to power them, with the company saying it had redesigned its graphics processing units (GPU), a key part of the chip where Nvidia dominates the market.

The new computers and the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max chips were unveiled at an online event heavily focused on professional users.

In the US, 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. Some will be available next week, while others will not ship until later in November.

Apple has seen a revitalization in its Mac business, roughly doubling its market share to nearly 11% 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.

As part of the focus on business users on Monday, it showed off a new secure screen sharing feature that would let them 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.

Unlike other laptop makers that might combine a central processor unit (CPU) from Intel with a GPU from Nvidia, Apple has combined both parts in its Apple silicon chips, which the company claims gives it better performance than its rivals.

Apple's shakeup of the market has spurred Qualcomm to redouble its efforts to make Arm-based chips for Windows, announcing plans last week to release a chip that is both faster and more energy efficient than some Apple offerings. Reuters last week reported that Nvidia also plans to jump into the PC market as early as 2025.

Corporate buying

Apple aimed the new machines squarely at designers, musicians and software developers, at one point highlighting that the way it uses memory can be used by artificial intelligence researchers, whose chatbots and other creations are often constrained by how much data can be held in the computer's memory.

Apple also tweaked its overall lineup of computers in ways that could change the behavior of corporate buyers.

While slashing the US price of the new 14-inch MacBook Pro from $1,999 to $1,599, Apple appeared to have eliminated a cheaper $1,299 13-inch model of its MacBook Pro that was a big seller to businesses, said Ben Bajarin, chief executive and principal analyst at Creative Strategies.

That move will likely clarify the choice between the company's model lines, prompting choices between Apple's productivity-oriented MacBook Air models that top out at $1,299 or the new $1,599 starting price for MacBook Pro models.

At Apple, the Mac hit $40.18 billion in revenue for its fiscal 2022, or about 11% of its revenue. While that was up 14% from the previous fiscal year, sales this year have slowed along with the rest of the PC industry, which has suffered a post-pandemic slump.

Apple said the new chips would be the first for laptops and desktops that use 3 nanometer manufacturing technology, which will give the chips better performance for each watt of electricity used.

Apple did not name who is making the chips, but 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.



Sam Altman Says Meta Offered $100 Million Bonuses to OpenAI Employees 

The logo of Meta is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (Reuters) 
The logo of Meta is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (Reuters) 
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Sam Altman Says Meta Offered $100 Million Bonuses to OpenAI Employees 

The logo of Meta is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (Reuters) 
The logo of Meta is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (Reuters) 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta has offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them, as the tech giant seeks to ramp up its artificial intelligence strategy.

The alleged attempts by Meta to hire OpenAI staffers are the latest signs of a frenzy to hire top engineers to develop AI models, and they come at a time when the Facebook owner is working on building its superintelligence unit to catch up with competitors.

Competition for AI talent has reached a feverish pitch as superstar researchers are being courted like professional athletes on the belief that individual contributors can make or break companies.

"They (Meta) started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team," Altman said on the Uncapped podcast that aired on Tuesday, hosted by his brother. "You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year."

"At least, so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," Altman said.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours, and Reuters could not verify the information.

"I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor," Altman said.

His comments come just days after Meta invested $14.3 billion in data-labeling startup Scale AI, and hired its top boss, Alexandr Wang, to lead its new superintelligence team.

Meta, once recognized as a leader in open-source AI models, has suffered from staff departures and has postponed the launches of new open-source AI models that could rival competitors like Google, China's DeepSeek and OpenAI.