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  This is the current MagSafe charger, which is sold separately from the iPhone 12. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Bloomberg has published yet another report sharing details of a planned Apple product launch. This time, the publication's sources say Apple is working on a magnetically attached battery pack for iPhones—it would be the first Apple-designed iPhone battery pack that does not double as a case.

The accessory would use the MagSafe feature introduced with the iPhone 12 lineup in October. It would magnetically attach to the back of new iPhones and presumably provide power wirelessly via the Qi standard that iPhones have adopted. According to Bloomberg's sources, the first prototypes have a "white rubber exterior."

Apple has also already shipped some MagSafe accessories for the iPhone, including a charging cable that uses the magnets and other components to optimally align the charging coils and produce faster charging speeds than were possible with previous iPhone models with non-MagSafe Qi charging capability.

Enlarge / The iPhone 12 and 12 Pro, side by side. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has posted multiple job listings indicating that it is hiring engineers to work on 6G technology internally so it does not have to rely on partners like Qualcomm as the next generation of wireless technology hits several years down the line.

The job listings, which were first spotted and reported by Bloomberg , include titles like "Wireless Research Systems Engineer - 5G/6G" and "RAN1/RAN4 Standards Engineer."

The listings have statements like "You will be part of a team defining and doing research of next-generation standards like 6G," "You will research and design next-generation (6G) wireless communication systems for radio access networks with emphasis on the PHY/MAC/L2/L3 layers," "Participate in industry/academic forums passionate about 6G technology," and "Contribute to future 3GPP RAN work items on 6G technology."

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There's been on onslaught of Apple leaks out of business publication Bloomberg over the past week, and the latest goes into a little more detail about an upcoming MacBook Air redesign.

Like the others, the report cites anonymous people familiar with Apple's plans. It claims a newly redesigned MacBook Air (presumably with either Apple's M1 chip for Macs or a successor to that chip) will "be released during the second half of this year at the earliest or in 2022."

But buried in this MacBook Air report is perhaps equally big news for a certain set of Mac users: it claims that Apple plans to reintroduce the SD card slot in new MacBook Pros—a detail that was left out of a story on those computers earlier this week.

Enlarge / The iPhone 12 and 12 Pro. The next iPhones aren't expected to change in look very much. (credit: Samuel Axon)

This weekend, business publication Bloomberg ran a plethora of articles sharing details about various upcoming Apple products. We previously covered what Bloomberg's sources said about the Mac lineup, but another report details upcoming iPhones.

According to "a person familiar with" Apple's work, the 2021 iPhone will be a small, iterative update and may carry the "S" label, which Apple has used to denote smaller upgrades to the iPhone in the past (for example, iPhone 6S or iPhone XS). This is in part because the iPhone 12 lineup introduced last fall was particularly loaded with new features and design changes, but it was also because COVID-19 restrictions have slowed Apple's engineers down, according to the report.

While the iPhone 13 wouldn't have a radically new design, the report does describe one potential change of note that Apple is testing internally: the addition of an in-screen fingerprint reader.

Enlarge / The iPhone 12. (credit: Samuel Axon)

As rumored many months ago, Apple's silicon ambitions don't end with replacing Intel CPUs with its own in Macs—it plans to ditch Qualcomm modems in favor of its own custom-designed chips for iPhones, according to Apple hardware tech lead Johny Srouji.

Srouji confirmed the company's plans when speaking to employees during an internal town hall meeting, as reported by Bloomberg today. Apple acquired Intel's 5G smartphone modem business last summer. That acquisition of Intel's intellectual property and resources was key for Apple's new efforts.

Quoted in the Bloomberg story, Srouji told Apple employees:

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  2015 13-inch i7-powered MacBook Air at left, 2020 13-inch M1-powered MacBook Air at right. [credit: Lee Hutchinson ]

Citing sources close to Apple, a new report in Bloomberg outlines Apple's roadmap for moving the entire Mac lineup to the company's own, custom-designed silicon, including both planned released windows for specific products and estimations as to how many performance CPU cores those products will have.

The M1, which has four performance cores (alongside four efficiency cores), launched this fall in the company's lowest-end computers—namely, the MacBook Air and comparatively low-cost variants of the Mac mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro. These machines have less memory and fewer ports than the company's more expensive devices. The Macs with more memory or ports, such as the 16-inch MacBook Pro, are still sold with Intel CPUs.

According to the report's sources, Apple plans to release new, Apple Silicon-based versions of 16-inch MacBook Pro and the higher end 13-inch MacBook Pro configurations in 2021, with the first chips appropriate for at least some of these computers arriving as early as the spring, and likely all of them by the fall. New iMac models that share CPU configurations with high-end MacBook Pros are also expected next year.