Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes Apple‘s M4 chips for Macs will arrive sooner rather than later, possibly “later this year,” according to a report from earlier this month.
Now Gurman says Apple could skip the M3 generation entirely for some Macs, most notably the Mac mini.
To be clear, Gurman has no specific inside information confirming that Apple is planning to skip the M3 mini.
But based on Apple’s supposed timeline of late 2024 to early 2025 for the M4 mini, he believes it’s “probably safe to say” that there isn’t enough room on the calendar for an M3 mini to launch between now and then.
This wouldn’t be the first time an Apple Silicon Mac has skipped a chip generation: the 24-inch iMac was never updated with the M2, instead jumping directly from the M1 to the M3. The Mac Pro also skipped the M1 series, moving from Intel chips to the M2.
But if the M4 comes out in late 2024, it would be a much faster turnaround than we’ve seen so far for other Apple Silicon chips. About a year and a half passed between the introduction of the first M1 Macs in late 2020 and the first M2 Macs in summer 2022; About the same amount of time passed between mid-2022 and the introduction of the first M3 Macs in late 2023.
If Apple maintains a more typical 18-month gap between the first M3 Macs and the first M4 Macs, there’s still plenty of time for an M3-based Mac mini update to be released.
Apple last updated the Mac mini in January 2022, replacing the M1 model with an M2 version and introducing a new variant with an M2 Pro chip that included more Thunderbolt ports, better external display support, and better CPU and GPU performance.
Most of Apple’s desktop computers, both Mac Minis and Mac Studio and Mac Pro, still use Apple’s M2 chips, while all laptops and the iMac have received an M3 update at this point.
Gurman’s previous report on the M4 suggests it will be an “AI-centric” series of chips, which likely means it will beef up the processors’ neural engine to power the device’s generative AI features that are expected to come with iOS 18. and the other major updates to Apple’s operating system this year.
Apple already has an advantage in the PC ecosystem in this regard: all M-series and A-series chips, since 2017’s A11 Bionic, have included a version of the Neural Engine. Intel and AMD processors have only begun to include similar neural processing units (NPUs) in the last year.
Gurman has not reported specifications for the M4 series, but has said it will include at least three levels of performance: a base model codenamed “Donan”, a mid-range version codenamed “Brava” and a model high-end model codenamed “Hydra”. “. It remains to be seen which of these chips would replace the Pro, Max, and Ultra processors in the current generation M2 and M3 Macs.
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