“Scary Fast”: Apple will stream a new product event on October 30

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Apple is squeezing one more round of product announcements into October after all. The company announced today that it would be streaming a product event at 5 pm Pacific/8 pm Eastern on October 30, unusually late in the day (and in the month) for an Apple event. The "Scary Fast" tagline doesn't give away anything about what Apple plans to announce, but both history and well-sourced Apple reporters and analysts suggest that the company will focus mostly on the Mac.

As Bloomberg's Mark Gurman pointed out yesterday, the iMac and all three sizes of MacBook Pro have longer-than-usual shipping times listed on Apple's website, which often indicates that a refresh is imminent. I'd guess that having an actual livestreamed product event—rather than just announcing the new products via press release, as Apple did with the new Apple Pencil last week—increases the likelihood that any new Macs will come with next-generation M3 chips. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that Apple will focus on M3 MacBook Pros at the event, although as recently as two weeks ago he didn't think Apple had anything left to announce this year.

These new MacBook Pros would be coming just 11 months after the M2 refresh for those Macs, which launched back in January. But it's worth noting that these Macs were probably meant to be released in late 2022, based on the original URL of their announcement video. It's not that the M3 MacBooks Pro are a little early; it's probably that the M2 versions were a little late.