Yes, I agree with
@TechnoMonk, I think the lesson from the Apple silicon cadence so far is that Apple is serious (meaning it's not just marketing-speak) when it talks about its silicon being driven by its products. I'll quote one interview, but there are several more like this. Anand Shimpi, in February 2023 with Andru Edwards:
"The silicon team doesn’t operate in a vacuum, right? When these products are being envisioned and designed, folks on the architecture team, the design team, they’re there, they’re aware of where we’re going, what’s important, both from a workload perspective, as well as the things that are most important to enable in all of these designs. [...] You can look at how chip design works at Apple. You have to remember we’re not a merchant silicon vendor, at the end of the day we ship product. So the story for the chip team actually starts at the product, right? [...] On the silicon side, the team doesn’t pull any punches, right? The goal across all the IPs is, one, make sure you can enable the vision of the product, that there’s a new feature, a new capability that we have to bring to the table in order for the product to have everything that we envisioned, that’s clearly something that you can’t pull back on. And then secondly, it’s do the best you can, right? Get as much down in terms of performance and capability as you can in every single generation. The other thing is, Apple’s not a chip company. At the end of the day, we’re a product company. So we want to deliver, whether it’s features, performance, efficiency. If we’re not able to deliver something compelling, we won’t engage, right? We won’t build the chip. So each generation we’re motivated as much as possible to deliver the best that we can."
It's also worth noting that, in that same interview, Shimpi uses the term "cadence" to refer to whether or not every product gets every generation of silicon. So Apple's braintrust isn't really thinking in terms of annual or other cycles when they think about cadence:
"But really the thing that we see, that the iPhone and the iPad have enjoyed over the years, is this idea that every generation gets the latest of our IPs, the latest CPU IP, the latest GPU, media engine, neural engine, and so on and so forth, and so now the Mac gets to be on that cadence too. If you look at how we’ve evolved things on the phone and iPad, those IPs tend to get more efficient over time. There is this relationship, if the fundamental chassis doesn’t change, any additional performance you draw, you deliver has to be done more efficiently, and so this is the first time the MacBook Pro gets to enjoy that and be on that same sort of cycle."
This M4 release perfectly illustrates these two points. The 7th-generation iPad Pro gets M4 because it needs a specific display engine that M3 does not have. So it launches now, not a year from M3, or 18 months, but
now, because the iPad Pro with its tandem OLED display needs it. But that doesn't mean the M4 is just an M3 with an additional display engine. No. It's a new generation and everything will shift to it now. That's what a product-driven cadence means.
That said, I'm still in "I'll believe it when I see it" mode. The iPhone's annual cadence is hard to ignore, but everything about the M-series (and the A-series X cadence that preceded it) argues for this more flexible approach. I still believe, deep down, that M3 Ultra and M3 Extreme will launch in less than a month at WWDC. But my logical brain says that's wrong, and M4 Ultra is on the way...
