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.



Trump Expected to Shift Course on Antitrust, Stop Google Breakup

The Google logo is seen on the Google house at CES 2024, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, January 10, 2024. (Reuters)
The Google logo is seen on the Google house at CES 2024, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, January 10, 2024. (Reuters)
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Trump Expected to Shift Course on Antitrust, Stop Google Breakup

The Google logo is seen on the Google house at CES 2024, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, January 10, 2024. (Reuters)
The Google logo is seen on the Google house at CES 2024, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, January 10, 2024. (Reuters)

Donald Trump will likely dial back some of the antitrust policies pursued under the administration of President Joe Biden, potentially including a bid to break up Alphabet's Google over its dominance in online search, experts said.

Trump is expected to continue cases against Big Tech, several of which began in his first term, but his recent skepticism about a potential Google breakup highlights the power he will hold over how those cases are run.

"If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it's more fair," he said at an event in Chicago in October, Reuters reported.

The US Department of Justice is currently pursuing two antimonopoly cases against Google - one over search and another over advertising technology, as well as a case against Apple . The US Federal Trade Commission is suing Meta Platforms and Amazon.com.

The DOJ has laid out a range of potential remedies in the search case, including making Google divest parts of its business such as the Chrome Web browser and ending agreements that make it the default search engine on devices like Apple's iPhone.

But the trial over those fixes will not happen until April 2025, with a final ruling likely in August. That gives Trump and the DOJ time to change course if they choose, said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University.

"He is certainly in the position to control the DOJ's disposition of the remedies phase," said Kovacic, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under then-president George W. Bush.

Trump is also likely to pull back on some policies that have irritated dealmakers under the Biden administration, attorneys said. One is a reluctance to settle with merging companies, which was previously common and let companies address competition problems that agencies raised about deals by taking actions like selling part of the business.

The FTC and DOJ would likely scrap merger review guidelines crafted under Biden, said Jon Dubrow, a partner at law firm McDermott Will & Emery.

"The 2023 merger guidelines were very hostile to mergers and acquisitions," he said, echoing a view widely held on Wall Street.

The FTC's ban on most noncompete clauses in employer-employee contracts could be more vulnerable to a lawsuit brought by the US Chamber of Commerce, if the FTC votes not to defend it.

About 30 million people, or 20% of US workers, have signed noncompetes, according to the FTC. The agency is currently appealing a court ruling that blocked the rule.

But such actions to dismantle the work of FTC Chair Lina Khan will depend on a Trump-appointed replacement being confirmed to give the bipartisan five-member commission a Republican majority.

Khan's initiatives focused on what she saw as societal harms caused by unchecked corporate consolidation, drawing praise from both Democrats and some Republicans, including Vice President-elect JD Vance. But some in the business and legal communities have criticized her approach as too aggressive.

Trump is not expected to drastically curtail antitrust enforcement, however. A similar number of merger cases was brought under his first term as during the first two years of the Biden administration, according to an analysis by the Sheppard Mullin law firm.