Just how reliable are the rumors that the next 13" (or 14") will be ARM?
Well, rumors will always be rumors. ?
However you can take a step back and try to look a the bigger picture. By that I mean looking at the industry in general and look at the available information of upcoming products. Since Intel dropped a lot of marketing material and technical background information about their upcoming Xe graphics products in the lap of journalists this week, you can clearly see what they talked about and what they NOT talked about. Just by using Intel's own product projections and roadmaps, you will notice that the Tiger Lake parts with Xe graphics are still quite a bit away.
After reading a couple more articles today, it seems that the rumored release windows I mentioned in my earlier post were quite spot on. There is still the possibility that Intel trolled the journos and the Sept. 2nd launch will not just be a typical paper launch, but a hard launch with many notebooks from all the larger OEMs available on launch day. Although that seems unlikely since some journalists specifically mentioned in their articles that they don't have seen any signs of review units whith Tiger Lake CPUs at all. Usually those machines would be on the way to them right now.
There are also not many reported retailer gaffes by listing SKUs early yet. I think someone claimed to have seen a low end HP laptop somewhere, but didn't provide screenshots.
Just as a reminder, it took roughly 3 months to actually see Ice Lake-U notebooks in the stores after the CPU "launch" and those were a few halo products by Dell (XPS 13 2-in-1) and Lenovo (something Yoga-branded).
On the other hand look at Apple's strategic interest in making that transition happen as smooth as possible. They committed themselves to a two year transition period which pretty much means that they don't have many products that would be refreshed multiple times during that period. While I get the hope that we see Tiger Lake-U machines, and personally I'd want a 14" MBP with 3.5k Mini-LED display ideally in a 6c/12t config for myself, it doesn't make much sense for them to delay the introduction of Apple Silicon in one of their most popular Mac product lines.
Keep also in mind that Tiger Lake brings a lot of minor improvements like USB4 to the table. It's much easier for Apple to differentiate the two competing architectures if end-users have some clear marketing pointers why they should buy a new notebook. In today's market of over-engineered consumer devices many users don't really care about the CPU architecture inside anymore as long as the comparison of marketing checkpoints convinces them that the new device is "better" and Safari feels snappier.
All the folks who actually care about raw performance, power-efficiency and other in-depth aspects of their purchases are pretty much a minority in the Apple eco-system.
