Mashable: Apple has been testing the machines using third-party applications from the App Store and logging the performance.

Apple is rumored to be working on a new generation of Mac machines that will leverage the company's new in-house processor. New reports claim that Apple has begun testing at least nine Mac models with four different M2 chips, which indicates that the company is preparing to offer them.

Apple has been testing the machines using third-party applications from the App Store, and the developer logs of those apps offer us a sense of what to expect from the company's future batch of computers.

A MacBook Air with an M2 processor (eight CPU cores and ten graphics cores, up from eight in the present model) is one of the devices apparently being tested. New MacBook Air may be slimmer, have more ports, and use MagSafe to charge. This is according to previous reports. Also rumored to be in the works is an entry-level M2 MacBook Pro with the same characteristics as the MacBook Air, and a Mac mini with an M2 and an M2 Pro processor.

The report claims that Apple has begun testing new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with 64GB of RAM driven by M2 Pro and M2 Max CPUs, which were just announced in October. For comparison, the current M2 versions have ten CPU cores and 32 graphics cores. There's also talk of an updated Mac Pro, which will purportedly use the M1 Ultra's successor.

The Mac Studio now runs on the M1 Ultra, Apple's most powerful chip yet. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman cautions that the tech giant can't guarantee that all of the models it's currently testing will be made available. The new MacBook Air and Mac mini, as well as the new entry-level MacBook Pro, are expected to be introduced sometime this year, according to the expert.