Rumor: Apple to announce three new MacBooks on October 27

According to KGI Securities, Apple will announce three new MacBooks at its media event on October 27. That will be a 13″ MacBook and 13″ and 15″ MacBook Pros. In addition, delivery of new iMacs and external monitors would wait until 2017.

According to KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who often proves reliable with this sort of thing, the new MacBook Pros will receive many upgrades over previous generations, but he won’t go into detail about that. That writes 9to5Mac, which has been able to see a report from the company. This product series may have a row of OLED function keys above the keyboard, as claimed in rumors circulating in September. The function of the function keys would depend on the context. The new Pros would also reportedly get Touch ID support. The existing MacBook Pros are now a year and a half old and run on Broadwell CPUs.

Apple’s latest laptop series, simply called MacBook, was introduced last year and was only available in 12″ format. In 2016 this line did have a Skylake refresh. This year this model would make another comeback, but with a screen that is a few inch larger than the existing models. Furthermore, KGI does not talk about any details about this laptop. Characteristic of this model is that it is particularly thin and light, but that all connections were via USB-C, which prevents the use of adapters are necessary.

The new iMacs and external monitors, possibly with 5K resolution and onboard GPU, may be shown at the event, but KGI says it’s convinced Apple isn’t ready for a release in the short term. Availability wouldn’t be until sometime in the first half of 2017. KGI Securities does not mention the MacBook Air series.

Apple’s laptops generally become available soon after the announcement, in some cases as early as the same day.

Mock-up of MacBook Pro with OLED bar by Martin Hajek