Apple promises “exciting announcements” next week

It's official: Apple will be announcing new products next week, the week beginning 28 October.

Posting to X, Apple marketing boss Greg Joswiak urged Apple fans to, "Mac your calendars! We have an exciting week of announcements ahead, starting on Monday morning. Stay tuned…"

That suggests we'll have multiple individual product announcements rather than a single event. And we're pretty sure we know what those announcements are going to be.

What to expect from Apple's "exciting week"

The biggest news next week is going to be the launch of M4-powered Macs which, with one exception, will be the same as the current models but with a new processor inside. Some rumours have predicted that we could also see a memory bump. The standard Mac memory is currently 8GB in most models, and that's reportedly increasing to 16GB.

The exception to the no-redesign is the Mac mini, which is expected to become much smaller and look more like the Apple TV 4K.

The new models we're expecting to see are:

• M4 Mac mini
• M4 iMac
• M4 MacBook Pro 14-inch
• M4 Pro/Max MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch

We're also expecting to see Apple launch USB-C versions of several key peripherals including the Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard: while Macs have been moving to USB-C for some time these accessories are currently Lightning.

The other big launch next week is iOS 18.1, which will deliver Apple Intelligence to US customers.

Apple Intelligence won't be coming to the UK just yet, however: it's scheduled for launch here in December with iOS 18.2. But, if you don't want to wait that long, the developer beta for iOS 18.2 is out now and enables you to use Apple Intelligence with an iPhone 15 Pro/Max or any iPhone 16 without having to change your language or location.