Update: Check out the Apple October Event Live Blog for last-minute rumors and big news.

Apple will host a "Scary Fast" event today, Monday, October 30, at 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

Specifically, a new MacBook Pro laptop and a new 24-inch iMac are expected to be announced at Apple's October event. If true, these new Macs could begin hitting store shelves as early as early November, just in time for the older models to fall prey to the best Black Friday sales season of 2023.

This is a big deal not only in terms of getting to see the next generation of Apple silicon and the first Macs with it, but also because the laptop chip market is about to heat up significantly.

Last week, Qualcomm held a special event in Hawaii to announce its Snapdragon X Elite chip, which will be available in Windows laptops by mid-2024. Qualcomm's new Snapdragon CPU is comparable in power to Apple's M2, but it remains to be seen how it will compare to the new M3 chip that Apple is expected to unveil on Monday.

Also, Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs will debut in December, bringing an all-new "chiplet" design (for Intel) with enhancements aimed at improving performance and battery life, but the best laptops with them, We'll have to wait and see if they can outperform the best MacBooks on the market.

Of course, all we know for sure now is that Apple will hold an event on October 30 to announce the "Scary Fast" tagline and a teaser image of the MacOS Finder icon. It is quite possible that not a single new Mac will be announced on Monday, and instead we will see a bunch of new iPads with M3 running macOS or something.

However, that seems highly unlikely. I've been writing about technology for over a decade now, and I have a pretty good feeling about the prospect of seeing a new Mac on Monday. Here's what I think we'll see at Apple's "Scary Fast" event on October 30.

The centerpiece of Apple's "Scary Fast" event will almost certainly be the new slice of Apple silicon, the M3 chip. The processor is said to use TSMC's 3nm process and will be the most compact (and perhaps the most powerful) Mac chip Apple has ever shipped.

This will be the third major iteration of Apple's SoC (system-on-chip) processors for Macs and tablets, and much will depend on how well they perform against their predecessors and competitors.

This is because the original Apple M1 chip debuted in the first MacBook Air M1 in 2020, making a splash with unprecedented improvements in performance and battery life. Later, when it was incorporated into the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro in the form of the more powerful Apple M1 Pro and Apple M1 Max, we saw just how powerful Apple's silicon could be, and these pro-grade M1-powered MacBooks, immediately topped our list of the best laptops for video editing.

However, after the seismic introduction of the M1 in the MacBook, iPad, and the new Apple iMac 24-inch, the introduction of the Apple M2 chip in 2022 was markedly less exciting.

One reason for this is that the M2 and M2 Pro/M2 Max chips failed to deliver the same scale of improvement as the previous generation of chips that wowed us in 2020. It may also be because the MacBook Pro 13-inch M2 (2022), which debuted the same year, was a bit lackluster, and while the battery life was phenomenal, the design was dated and the performance was not great. [14-inch MacBook Pro 2023 and 16-inch MacBook Pro 2023 are great mobile video editing machines, but a lot is riding on the debut of Apple's M3 chip.

If a new M3 chip is announced, I expect it will be in the new Apple iMac. the 2023 iMac with the M3 will likely look very similar to the 24-inch iMac that Apple released in 2021 with the M1 chip.

I reviewed that PC for Tom's Guide, and in my review of the Apple iMac 2021, I enthusiastically stated that it felt like a "breath of fresh air" for the iMac line, offering enough speed and utility for a family PC with a sleek, elegant design He said. Sure, the M1 chip is more than powerful enough for day-to-day work and basic tasks, but even the 2021 iMacs were not suited for serious gaming or demanding computational tasks such as game development or video editing. [If a new iMac is announced on Monday, we can at least expect a power boost with the new M3 chip. If the company also announces a new MacBook Pro with M3 Pro/M3 Max (more on that later), the iMac may also be introduced with a more powerful Pro or Max chip, not just the base M3.

But even if Apple doesn't offer more than the M3 in the new iMac, there is still plenty of room for improvement in the company's excellent 2021 all-in-one. For example, the iMac's stand could be improved to be vertically adjustable. Also, please stop treating customers who buy less expensive models unfairly by denying them access to some color schemes and key features like Touch ID, as you did with the iMac 2021.

Last but not least, I heard persistent reports that Apple plans to announce a new MacBook Pro at an event on October 30.

While I'd like to believe it, I can't say for sure which MacBook will be unveiled on Monday; the M3 chip is expected to be announced along with the new iMac, so it seems certain that a new 13-inch MacBook Pro model will also be announced.

However, according to a last-minute report by Bloomberg's Apple Whisperer Mark Gurman, it seems unlikely that Apple will announce the 13-inch MacBook Pro M3 at Monday's event.

This is because the only other MacBooks that Gurman and other sources have persistently said are slated for an update are the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Since these beastly machines debuted in January of this year, it seems a bit early to see them refreshed, and if they are refreshed, it is speculated that they will continue to carry the more powerful "Pro" and "Max" variants of the Apple silicon.

In other words, if Apple is indeed announcing new 14" and 16" MacBook Pros on Monday as reported, it is likely that both the new M3 chip and the more powerful Pro and Max variants will be available.

How powerful? While we can't say for sure, Gurman certainly gives his best guess: that the MacBook Pro M3 Pro chip could have 12 CPU cores and 18 graphics cores. By comparison, the rumored M3 Max chip could have as many as 16 or more CPU cores and 40 GPU cores.

(The current M2 Pro and M2 Max chips in the MacBook Pro have up to 12/19 and 12/38 CPU/graphics cores, respectively, so this could be a pretty big performance jump.)

However, it is hard to imagine Apple showing the new M3 chip along with the new iMac on Monday, but skipping the new M3 MacBook Air and Pro and immediately introducing the M3 Pro and Max variants of the new 14" and 16" MacBook Pro It is hard to tell, so I think something is missing here.

However, there are a few things about this Apple October event that are a bit out of the ordinary. Most notably, it will begin at 5:00 PM Pacific Time, rather than the usual (and much more reasonable) broadcast time of 10:00 AM Pacific Time.

Clearly, Apple is trying to tie the spooky seasonal appeal to this event, trying to get me to miss my dinner reservation. However, since the product announcements are likely to focus on performance-oriented Macs, perhaps they also want to have some fun with it.

Will we really see the new M3 chip in the new iMac and new MacBook Pro? Because I really like the 2021 iMac and would like to see Apple improve upon that flawed masterpiece. But whatever Apple products we will encounter on Monday, this "Scary Fast" event is sure to be filled with over-the-top crowdwork and silly Halloween jokes.