Apple focuses on SOFTWARE at the WorldWide Developers Conference not HARDWARE. Highlight unlikely they would talk about any hardware especially a specific product like a MBP 16 or bigger iMac.
Apple has a history of announcing
hardware at WWDC. In 2017 they announced
7 new macs.
See here. They don’t do it every year, but it’s not unreasonable at all to expect new hardware this year. Rumors are that the next iteration of Mac chips started production last month. M1 had about 5 weeks of lead time before the announcement, and that was used in 3 top-selling macs. The higher-end models that would likely get announced ship less volume, so they easily could have chips ready shortly after WWDC this year.
WWDC New Hardware History:
2010: iPhone 4
2012: MBA, MBP
2013: MP, AirPort, MBA,
2017: iMac, MB, MBP, iMac Pro, iPad, HP
2019: Mac Pro, Pro Display
2020: Dev Transition Kit
Didn’t Apple release the A14 iPad Air before the iPhone 12?
Correct. The point being they didn't release the A14 and then the A15 later that year. There is at least a 1-year gap between chip designs. So I think what they meant was we got M1 last November, so the earliest we'd likely see an M2 chip (whatever chip goes into the
next MacBook air) until this November - one year later.
Now we could certainly see a higher-core M1 based chip sooner (maybe a 12-core M1 chip, or M1X chip). The point being, the chip design is still using the same firestorm & icestorm cores that the M1 uses. Whenever Apple goes to an M2 chip, it will use a totally different core design in the same way A13 --> A14 uses different core designs.
I heard the new Macbook Air (or Macbook) with similar iMac colors are coming out soon
Prosser just saw schematics of them, and had someone make renders of what they could look like, but if you watch FPT he says these are likely coming later in the year (maybe around Oct-Nov). All of the rumors are stemming from this one leak by Prosser AFAIK.
If TSMC began production of M2 in April, the fab cycle time is around 100 days. Add another month for Quanta to assemble the whole thing and the earliest date is August. The M1 chips from launch day MacBooks had October dates on them.
We got M1 production rumors about 5 or so weeks before the release of M1 macs. Not sure how the correlates to production, but seeing as the high-end MBP models don't sell anywhere near the units the air and lower-end MBP sell, they very well
could have something ready sometime soon-ish.