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.



South Korea Fines Meta about $15 Mln over Collection of User Data

A 3D printed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta is placed on laptop keyboard in this illustration taken on November 2, 2021. (Reuters)
A 3D printed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta is placed on laptop keyboard in this illustration taken on November 2, 2021. (Reuters)
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South Korea Fines Meta about $15 Mln over Collection of User Data

A 3D printed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta is placed on laptop keyboard in this illustration taken on November 2, 2021. (Reuters)
A 3D printed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta is placed on laptop keyboard in this illustration taken on November 2, 2021. (Reuters)

South Korea has ordered Facebook owner Meta Platforms to pay 21.62 billion won ($15.67 million) in fines after finding it had collected sensitive user data and given it to advertisers without a legal basis, Seoul's data protection agency said.

The US tech giant obtained information from about 980,000 South Korean Facebook users on issues such as their religion, political views and sexuality while failing to seek agreement from users, the Personal Information Protection Commission said in a statement on Tuesday.

The information was then used by some 4,000 advertisers, the agency said.

A Meta Korea official declined to comment.

"Specifically, it has been found that (Meta) analyzed user behavior data such as pages they liked and advertisements they clicked on Facebook and created and managed advertising themes related to sensitive information," the commission said.

This included users being categorized for example as being North Korean defectors or following a certain religion, the agency said.

Meta had also unfairly declined a request by users to access personal information and failed to prevent data on about 10 South Koreans from being leaked by hackers, the agency said.