Everything M4 (other than the announced iPad Pro) is speculative at this point. But Max Tech did bring up some good points about how we probably won't see an M3 Mini if the M4 chip drops today (it did).
This is quite good news because if he's right (about Mini's skipping over the M3) we'll get a somewhat larger performance bump going straight to an M4.
I feel i'm in a pretty good position because my 2018 i5 Mini is holding up really well for what I do. So I can wait this thing out and perhaps grab an M2 Pro, an M4 (speculative), or an M4 Pro (speculative) in a year or more when it's sorted out.
I wonder if the reason why we haven’t had the M3 CPU in more products is because Apple don’t intend for it to linger too long in the supply chain due to its experimental N3B node size (So called evolutionary Dead end).
Therefore the A17Pro probably won’t go into next years iPhone 16 (non pro) but we will get a variant of it on a more common node and potentially cheaper to make with better yield (there will be room to do the usual deactivate a single GPU core to up the valid CPUs).
it could in theory allow the iPhone 16 to be a bit thinner than the 15 because of the more efficient process. Kind of like how the M4 iPads are so much thinner than the M2 ones.
back to the mini though, the M4 makes the more sensible choice as cpu over the more expensive and difficult to make M3 cpu due to the N3B process used. It may explain why Apple aren’t using the A17 pro in the iPad mini - a smaller process but cheaper to make A17 (non pro) makes more sense in the iPad mini but we might not see stocks of that till October due to iPhone 16 getting first dibs on it And Apple wanting people to pull the trigger on the m4 iPads instead.
