Apple could announce a new MacBook and price cuts for the current model early next year, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities.
Kuo's latest research note predicts that Apple is planning to introduce new hardware features for a revamped 2017 MacBook lineup, including MacBook Pros, and that prices for those notebooks will drop in the first half of next year, MacRumors reported this week.
While a price drop would be consistent with Apple's historical strategy, which has been to discount prices of older models after a year or so, component upgrades may be more of a stretch. Kuo predicts that the refreshed MacBook Pro will have support for up to 32GB of RAM, an amount that Intel processors in current Apple notebooks don't support.
Such an upgrade, then, would depend on whether or not Intel releases its Cannonlake processors in time. They're currently scheduled for the second half of 2017. In addition to supporting more RAM, the Cannonlake family is expected to take advantage of recent advances in 10 nanometer chip fabrication, recently pioneered by Samsung.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 8 rumor mills have also been churning this week, with Nikkei citing sources that say the next iPhone will include wireless charging. Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturing giant that supplies components found in many mobile devices, is reportedly making wireless charging modules compatible with a next-gen iPhone.
Nikkei notes that whether or not such a feature ends up in a future Apple handset depends on whether or not Foxconn is able to iron out supply chain issues, which recently plagued the launch of the iPhone 7.
Apple, which just last week unvieled a refreshed MacBook Pro, did not immediatley respond to a request for comment.