IMO MP is really about a direction more than it is simply about sales into a relatively small niche. So chasing the Intel direction would be way, way wrong. Better to work to define Apple's highest-end future [even if it misses the mark].
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M4 MacBook Air Production to Begin Soon, M4 Mac Studio Delayed
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Noooooooo, this is finally our chance for ALL Mac’s to be on same generation. We need that M4 Ultra in the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
Pour one out for the M3 Ultra that never existed. It’s hanging out somewhere up in the sky with the A17.
Pour one out for the M3 Ultra that never existed. It’s hanging out somewhere up in the sky with the A17.
Can we please have this in some decent colours Apple. Silver, slightly off sliver, darker silver and very dark blue aren't cutting it anymore.
The M4 Pro/Max/Ultra waiting until a dedicated or developer event seems perfectly logical, but the claim here is that the MacBook Air spec bump will debut after the holiday shopping season and the redesigned Mac mini despite both computers having >90% identical guts to the now six-month-old iPad Pro? Either Tim has a lot of excess channel inventory or Gurman’s spaghetti is coming off the wall again.
German and his predictions are a joke. How does he get paid for this garbage .
Surely the next Mac Studio and Pro will be M5? M4 will have been out for over a year by WWDC.
The M3 refresh of the Studio and Pro was probably scrapped because of issues with the Ultra that the M4 generation would rectify.
There were rumors that Apple was developing the M3 Ultra as a single-die standalone chip instead of two M3 Maxes stitched together. Indeed the M3 Max is reported to not feature the UltraFusion interconnect that enabled this. The N3B process node the M3 is based on has poor yield, and the bigger the physical size of the die means the bigger a physical area for a lithography defect. This is entirely conjecture but I'm guessing test yields of the M3 Ultra were so poor it wasn't worth Apple's while to release it, and they couldn't just stitch two Max chips together because they removed the UltraFusion connector.
The N3E process node has significantly better yield, making a single-die Ultra chip much more viable.
We need to go ALL and ONLY USB-D ports, immediately
Having any USB-C is holding up "progress" ... if you don't like it, pound sand!
/s
The M2 was out for a year when the Studio and Pro were refreshed last. And the original Studio debuted the M1 Ultra three months before Apple launched the M2. Apple typically prioritizes the base chip for higher volume devices first (alongside sharing node capacity with the A-series), then the Pro and Max variants for the MacBook Pros. The Studio and Pro both need Ultra chips which are usually the last to be built out.
Well said. Often folks in these fora fail tp grasp how important yields are when they say things like "Apple should do x..." My guess is that entire product lines are routinely defined around yields. And we have no clue how Apple's chip yields are playing out.
It’s a delay because there is no M3 Mac Studios and in some cases a M3 Max MacBook Pro beats the M2 Ultra Mac Studios
The MacBook Air spec bump occurred in the spring after the holiday shopping season this year though. Laptops aren't quite as common for a holiday gift as phones and tablets are, so I doubt there's a big incentive. Back to school season is probably a bigger sales window so having the MBA launch in spring with wide summertime availability is ideal.
Also keep in mind that TSMC has finite capacity with its bleeding edge process nodes, and the MacBook Air is the biggest seller. Even though the guts may be similar to the mini or the iPad TSMC likely lacks the capacity to produce enough chips for both at once (plus the A18 series).
And to add to that TSMC also has Qualcomm and Mediatek using the same N3E process node as Apple. Like the Dimensity 9400 and Snapdragon 8 Elite.
M4 Mac Pro out just in time for the first M5 device, excellent… as for the studio if true that’s not very good, but Gurmen has not always been the best with release schedules.
Why do they still sell the Mac Pro at this stage? It’s compatibility with cards seems extremely limited and the only real benefit it has is internal storage, when the current USB / Thunderbolt ports on Macs are just as good.
Why do they still sell the Mac Pro at this stage? It’s compatibility with cards seems extremely limited and the only real benefit it has is internal storage, when the current USB / Thunderbolt ports on Macs are just as good.
Yep, it handles all the media I throw at it. Until higher video resolutions, like 8K, become the norm, I have no reason to upgrade.
Apple are arguably not even really a pro company at this point. My out of arse guess is that 90% or more of their customers (iPhone Pro MacBook Pro iPad Pro) are students/general consumers/their children rather than the types we see on YouTube running rendering benchmarks or compiling their test suites.
And most actual professionals I know get bought Dells, Panasonics and Lenovos by their company.
To apple the word Pro is just consumerese for high-margin/premium.
With an increase in base RAM without any increase in price, it should make it a very good MacBook. Expecting to see it by March/April 2025