Apple is very strongly rumoured to be on the cusp of announcing the biggest MacBook Air ever, with a 15-inch screen set to dwarf the 13-inch model that's currently on sale. That M2 MacBook Air is generally accepted to be the best Mac for a whole load of people. But it might be about to get some competition with the 15-inch model thought to be ready for a June announcement.

That's the good news. The bad news is that anyone who had hoped that the bigger screen would also come with a better CPU is likely to be left disappointed.

Bigger display but the same old chip inside

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is often on the money when it comes to predicting products that Apple will soon announce, and a recent report suggests that Apple will announce the new laptop during the WWDC23 event on 5 June. It's said that Apple is already testing that machine ahead of the big unveiling.

"The Mac maker has begun testing the new machines with third-party apps from the App Store to validate their compatibility," Gurman reports. "That’s a necessary step in the run-up to the launch of a new device."

That would indeed suggest that an announcement is likely to happen soon. But despite previous reports that the 15-inch MacBook Air would sport an all-new M3 chip, that now seems unlikely.

Gurman reported that "the chip in the new laptop has eight main processing cores and 10 graphics cores, just like the current M2." That was followed up by today's Power On newsletter in which he said that any new Macs announced at WWDC in June "probably won't boast major new M3 chips." Instead, they're set to use "something in line with the current M2 processors."

Where that leaves Apple's M3 chips isn't clear, but it looks increasingly likely that they won't debut until much later in 2023 if not 2024.