Apple’s big Mac M4 reveal could happen in October, ahead of rumored on-sale date of November

MacBook Pro 16-inch with screen open in an office

(Image credit: Future)

Apple’s new Macs with M4 processors are set to go on sale in November, we’ve heard from the rumor mill.

MacRumors, to be precise, has word from a supposedly reliable source that all Apple’s apparently planned M4-toting Macs are going to be released in November.

As the tech site points out, this doesn’t preclude Apple from announcing the M4 Macs before November. As ever, the standard way of doing things is to reveal the hardware first, and it doesn’t go on sale until a bit later.

The rumor mill reckons that we will see new MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models with the M4 SoC, and we’re also expecting Mac mini and iMac M4 refreshes to boot.

If they all turn up as planned, these Macs could go on sale in a staggered launch throughout November, though MacRumors doesn’t elaborate on anything beyond the simple mention of that month being the arrival timeframe.

MacBook Pro 14 M3 Max being held in an outstretched arm — (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

Analysis: Logical conclusion on the launch date

So, how soon might the initial reveal be for these M4 Macs? Indeed, might we get an announcement at the imminent Apple event for September 9, next week? No, in a word, as while this event will (very likely) see the launch of macOS 15 Sequioa, there won’t be any Macs on the hardware front (what we will see is the big iPhone 16 launch, plus Apple Watches and AirPods).

As MacRumors points out, the announcement of these new M4 MacBooks and other Mac computers will likely be in October, which makes sense in terms of giving Apple breathing space from the September event, and, of course, October being the month before November. If November is the on-sale date, the Mac M4 reveal has to be October, really.

This would also follow Apple’s pattern in terms of launch timing last year, where we had the ‘Scary Fast’ reveal at the end of October, followed by Mac launches early in November.

There’s plenty of excitement around not just what the M4 chip will bring to the Mac line-up – it’s only appeared in the iPad Pro so far – but also the prospect that Apple might run with a minimum spec of 16GB of system RAM (finally) across all its Macs at the entry-level. It’s about time, really, particularly when it comes to the MacBook Pro 14-inch which still starts at 8GB with the current-gen model, mystifyingly.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).