15-inch MacBook Air on track for a 2023 launch as its 12-inch version gets the axe; Mac Pro also in the pipeline without user-expandable memory

Rumours about Apple's next generation of MacBooks have been around well before Apple refreshed the 13-inch MacBook Pro and Macbook Air with its newest M2 chip. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, a source for many of these said rumours, has now laid out Apple's roadmap for 2023, and unfortunately for small laptop enthusiasts, the rumoured 12-inch MacBook Air has been pushed back indefinitely.

Thankfully, the 15-inch MacBook Air variant is set to make a comeback. It'll probably run the base M2 chip because cooling anything more powerful will require a fan, and the MacBook Air's chassis won't allow it. Nonetheless, a larger chassis (and hopefully heatsink) will allow users to squeeze more performance out of the Apple M2 chip, maybe even transforming the MacBook Air into a somewhat-capable production machine.

Meanwhile, the M2 Pro/M2 Max-toting 12-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pro variants are slated for an early 2023 launch. Gurman says these will be "marginally" faster than their predecessors (M1 Pro/M1 Max). It isn't surprising, given that it is likely manufactured on TSMC's N5P node, which is an optimized version of the original N5 node. While multiple rumours have suggested the M2 Pro and M2 Max would use the next-gen N3 process, there's no way TSMC could have enough units ready on time because mass production begin on the N3E production line only recently.

Lastly, there have been talks about Apple bringing back the Mac Pro lineup. This time, it was rumoured to use Apple Silicon instead of off-the-shelf Intel Xeon processors. The chip, dubbed the M2 Extreme, was rumoured to pack 48 CPU and 152 GPU cores, but it got cancelled later. The 2023 Mac Pro will feature an M2 Ultra SoC instead. It will retain the cheese grater design of the 2019 model and miss out on user-expandable memory. This hardly comes as a shock due to Apple Silicon's onboard memory/storage controller, which also rendered SSD replacements on the Mac Studio impossible. Thankfully, the machine has two slots for "graphics, media and networking cards".

Buy the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro on Amazon