tech2 News Staff

More details on Apple’s upcoming MacBook Pro models have been leaked, but this time by Apple themselves.

The details were leaked in the macOS 10.12.4 public beta and were unearthed and interpreted by Apple blog Piker Universum.

The data reveals references to a new set of products with ids that do not match current Apple devices.

Further analysis of these products and a peek at Intel’s upcoming Kaby Lake processors reveals that the 2017 MacBook Pros will all be updated to Intel’s seventh generation Kaby Lake platform.

Essentially, every 6th generation Skylake processor in the current lineup will be replaced by an equivalent Kaby Lake processor. So the i5 6360U is replaced by the i5 7260U, the i5 6267U by the i5 7267U, the i7 6700HQ by the i7 7700HQ, and so on.

Kaby Lake is just a minor advancement over Skylake, so owners of current MacBook Pros will see no incentive to upgrade. Intel’s Kaby Lake platform is fractionally more efficient than Skylake and hence, runs fractionally faster, resulting in a minor bump in performance. The internal graphics does get a slight upgrade, resulting in reduced battery consumption during playback of certain types of 4K files, but that’s about it.

Apple sacrificed RAM capacity and speed on the altar of battery life last year. This year’s Kaby Lake MacBooks might be available with support for DDR4L memory and up to 32GB of RAM. This will indeed be good news for professionals with RAM-heavy workloads (rendering, game development, image processing, etc.).

Sadly, Piker Universum says that there’s no mention of new iMacs, Mac Minis or a Mac Pro in the beta update. There’s also no mention of a MacBook or MacBook Air. The latter is expected to be officially killed off soon enough.