Apple's large Apple silicon MacBook orders suggest expectations are high

16-inch MacBook Pro
16-inch MacBook Pro (Image credit: Rene Ritchie / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Apple has reportedly placed large Apple silicon MacBook orders.
  • That suggests Apple expects demand to be high once the notebooks ship.
  • Apple is expected to announce the machines next week.

Apple will hold a special event next week and is widely expected to announce new notebooks with Apple silicon inside. Expectations are already sky-high among those of us watching on from the outside but it would seem expectations are just as high inside Apple, too.

According to a new NIkkei report, Apple has ordered a ton of new machines which would suggest that the company expects them to be hugely popular among buyers.

In fact, Apple is said to have placed initial orders that match around 20% of the normal annual order total.

Apple is asking suppliers to produce 2.5 million MacBook laptops powered by its in-house designed CPU by early 2021 as the California tech giant looks to rapidly cut its reliance on Intel chips, sources have told Nikkei Asia.These initial production orders for the first MacBooks to use the Apple Silicon central processing unit are equivalent to nearly 20% of total MacBook shipments for 2019, which came in at 12.6 million units, sources briefed on the matter said.

It's hoped that Apple silicon will mean the new machines are not only super quick but also excellent in terms of power and thermal management. If that's the case and pricing is on point, Apple could be on to a big winner here.

It looks like someone inside Apple thinks the same thing.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.