By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) -Apple Inc on Monday kicked off an event oriented around its Mac laptops and music, offering a new subscription level for its Apple Music service for $4.99 a month that uses its Siri voice assistant.
Bloomberg had said Apple planned to release two new MacBook Pro models with 14-inch and 16-inch screens. The Cupertino, California-based company introduced some new laptop models last year that for the first time used its “Apple Silicon” chips, which it said would be phased in to the company’s desktop and laptop lineup over the course of two years.
Before Monday, Apple’s most powerful laptops still relied on chips from Intel Corp. The company has already placed a first generation in-house-designed M1 chip into some MacBooks as well as its Mac Mini and iMac desktop machines, but the new larger MacBook Pro models are expected to feature a second, more powerful generation of the company’s chip.
The new chip, along with a general rise in laptop sales as employees and students stocked up on tech hardware to work and learn from home, prompted a boom in Mac sales during the pandemic. Revenue rose 11% to $28.6 billion in Apple’s fiscal 2020, even as iPhone revenue declined 3%.
The expected MacBook Pro introduction comes weeks after Apple overhauled its iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad lineup.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco Writing by Bernard OrrEditing by Peter Henderson and Matthew Lewis)
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