TECH NEWS – Apple won’t release it this year because it would hurt the recently launched M3 line.
The MacBook Pro has been available since October with the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max models. It may have seemed that the company was rushing the release of the new models just to get them out in time for the holiday rush and make the year’s sales look better. However, technological advances continue and the M4 will follow the M3, but don’t expect it in 2024. According to a reporter, “formal development” of the portable Mac is already underway, which means that Apple wants to stay ahead of the competition.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman’s Q&A focused on the Apple Car (which we wrote about in detail), but the reporter also touched on a number of other topics, including the M4 MacBook Pro. Because of the formal development statement, it’s better to take a look at how the previous models have been received by customers. The M1 was announced in November 2020. The M2 followed in June 2022, and the M3 arrived last October. Therefore, Apple usually releases a new SoC (system-on-a-chip) every year and a half or so, so we can expect the M4 in the spring of 2025, and the announcement and M4 can only be in 2025.
While the M3 was manufactured by Apple using TSMC’s first-generation 3-nanometer process, the M4 will likely be manufactured using the Taiwanese chipmaker’s newer N3E process. It will also be used by Qualcomm and MediaTek in their smartphone silicon this year, and will certainly be used by Apple for the A18 Pro used in the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max (the phones will be released sometime in the fall).
It won’t be mass-produced on the 2-nanometer process because mass production of silicon wafers using this lithography won’t begin until the second half of 2025, so we’ll probably see it in the iPhone 17. And the workstation-level M3 Ultra silicon could come in mid-2024…
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