Buying a cheap laptop is easy. You just go to Best Buy or Newegg or Amazon or Walmart or somewhere, you pick the cheapest one (or the most expensive one that fits whatever your budget is), and you buy it. For as little as $200 or $300, you can bring home something new (as in, "new-in-box" not as in, "was released recently") that will power up and boot Windows or ChromeOS.
Apple claims that its 2026 models can deliver "up to 2x" the sustained read and write speeds of the M4 Pro and Max laptops. In our testing, the 4TB SSD in the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro bore that out: our unit could sustain a 13.6GB/s read speed and an even higher 17.8GB/s write speed.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max are no longer monolithic chips with all the CPU and GPU cores and everything else packed into a single silicon die. Using an 'all-new Fusion Architecture' like the one used to combine two Max chips into a single Ultra chip, Apple now splits the CPU cores (and other things) into one piece of silicon, and the GPU cores (and other things) into another piece of silicon.
The use of the word experience, rather than event or presentation, implies that Apple's typical presentation format won't apply here. And CEO Tim Cook more or less confirmed this when he posted that the company had "a big week ahead," starting on Monday. Apple is most likely planning multiple days of product launches announced via press release on its Newsroom site, with the "experience" on Wednesday serving as a capper and a hands-on session for the media.