If this event happens I predict Mac Mini with M3 and iMac will get M2 and won’t leap frog M2
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Apple's First M3-Powered Macs Likely to Launch in October
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Yep, I'm expecting the standard M3 before EOY and M3 Pro/Max in Q224 (WWDC).
Not sure what Gurman is smoking however - why would Apple release just the 13" MBA with M3 and keep the more expensive 15" model with M2? I assume there will be feature parity between the two.
Not sure what Gurman is smoking however - why would Apple release just the 13" MBA with M3 and keep the more expensive 15" model with M2? I assume there will be feature parity between the two.
Only MacBook Air with M3 is coming this fall - they always start out with the MBA on chip-upgrades, and they will arrive this fall, but nothing else M3, is my bet.
But probably talk about what will come in 2024.
No way M4 is early 2024 no matter what, it'll be at *least* very late 2024, likely earlyish 2025, if we see the base M3s in Oct we'll get the higher end M3s in early 2024, not M4s
The real question is if they do that will they upgrade the 15" at the same time? It's rare but not totally unprecedented for Apple to do iterations that quickly, especially if maybe the 15" really was supposed to launch earlier in the year and got bumped to WWDC as several rumors suggested.
The first models may be a refreshed 24" iMac with the M3 SoC with 8, 16 and 24 GB memory options.
Touch Bar mainly and the fan, you'd be surprised how many people still buy them 😊
I mean, it's kinda the same, if you consider 2 products in each category, basically for each grouping they have a "big" and a "small"
| Consumer | Pro |
| Mac Mini/iMac | Studio/MP |
| MBA 13/15 | MBP 14/16 |
Really the only 2 odd things out are the M2 Pro Mini which falls in between the regular Mini and the Studio and the 13" MBP, which also kinda falls in between and which seems to exist solely for certain corporate IT depts.
I guess what also makes things odd right now is that the iMac lags so far behind the Mini, I expect that'll get fixed with the M3
They will sell a lot of base 13” m3 Airs this October that’s for sure
Personally I've never, ever, gotten the appeal of the touchbar, but to each their own, maybe it does have a nice enough following for them to keep it around for that reason, but given they dropped it on everything else it seems more likely that it sticks around since it gives them a cheap "pro" machine to keep around for IT depts to buy that is super cheap for them to make because they can just keep reusing the same chassis. It's basically the iPhone SE of Macs
I think they should drop the 13" Pro and offer Touch Bar as an option on every MacBook, that's the only thing stopping me upgrading to the 14" or 16" Pro.
I'm patient, I'll wait, my M1 13" pro is still working great 😊
Despite comments from several people here, this is in fact expected. HRT was widely believed to be planned for the A16's GPU, and therefore the M2 GPU, before that entire design generation (CPU, GPU, NPU, etc.) was replaced at the "last minute" (in chip development terms, anyway) by a slightly improved A15/M1 generation design due to the delay in TSMC's N3 process. The A17/M3 should have a further refinement of that original design.
You're right to an extent, there are no real compelling reasons, to upgrade to the M2 from the M1, just like there were no real compelling reasons to upgrade from the 13 Pro to the 14 pro, however in the last quarter, Apple had a 10% increase year over year and they're the only Manufacturer to have an increase.
There has been a big over all decrease in lap top sales over the last year, due to the economic situation
It's because Apple didn't really push for it to do anything.
I use BetterTouchTool and have a little Now Playing widget that displays the album artwork, title, etc., together with weather, date and time. I also redesigned the brightness and volume buttons to be borderless and pack them closer together to have a much cleaner look. Also modified the volume down button to mute immediately with a long tap.
Almost everything about this is wrong.
The issue wasn't TSMC shortages, it was that the entire N3 process was delayed.
The M2 (and A16) was surely a stopgap, but not a compromise. It was whatever they could manage to crank out fast when it became clear they couldn't get N3 in time and they had to shelve the original designs (since you can't simply port an N3 design to N4/N5). And note that despite that, the generational performance improvement, while not what anyone wanted, was in the 15-20% range, which would be considered extremely good in the intel world. We're only disappointed because we were so spoiled by the amazing leap forward that was the M1.
There is no "disturbing trend". In an extremely down market, Apple's picking up significant market share. The sales drop you're talking about was due to a combination of macro trends and an extremely tough compare. That was just one quarter, definitionally not a trend.
Some of us said the 15” release timing was poor. They should’ve just waited.
Totally agree, it's a personal preference, I love the Touch Bar, it's much easier to use, for emojis, adjusting volume & brightness, controlling media content and fonts when typing.
It's cheaper than the other pros, because of the screen size & screen tech, IO's and the speakers.
I very much doubt, the M3 pro will be launched with the old chassis.
I probably won't buy it, because of the 3 areas I've mentioned, however I would love the Touch Bar to be an option on all MacBooks, particularly all the pro models 😊
Except I and a lot of folks using Pro machines for work don't look down at my keyboard for any of that, I don't look down at my keyboard - and it's completely useless when docked at a desk.
I had a touch bar on my work issued 2016 MBP until I got my M1P I'm using now, all the touch bar ever was was an annoyance if I needed to hit escape (I'm aware they did finally fix that particular problem), and if my fingers brushed against it at any point while working - and that was only when it was visible at all since the machine spent most of the time in clamshell docked at home or in the office.
If Apple had released an external keyboard with the touchbar, as they did finally with touchID, it might have made more sense to me, even if I didnt personally want it, because at least then people who switch between docked and not could use it for their workflows consistently, and it would have been available to Mini/MP/iMac users, but without that it kinda always seemed like a cheap gimmick.
I guess it also didnt help that it was paired with such an unreliable keyboard for so long.
The first chips are usually the smaller ones (and yes the others are multi-chiplets of these but they have to be side by side on the silicon - I don't believe they are glued together after the fact). The new process usually has a higher failure rate early in manufacturing, and at a higher cost as a result. The ones that make it to the M1 Max, M1 Ultra are cherry picked out of the ones... so skipping the Studio at WWDC would have resulted in waiting a year for the M3 version of it...
Give me no more iMacs... please... no more! I prefer discrete components and the ability to swap out or reuse components.
There's a lot of arguing from historical precedent here but it's not clear that most of it applies.
Yes, if Apple continues recent past practices, we'll get the 13" MBA and MBP, and maybe an iMac because it's stupidly overdue. But consider: The upgrade from M1 to M2 was modest, and even so, a 13" MBA came dangerously close to the performance of the baseline 14" M1 MBP. There's no doubt that that cannibalized some sales.
The M2 -> M3 performance increase will be MUCH larger. Maybe not as large as the bump from Intel to M1 in 2020, but large - you've got the move to N3, and then on top of that roughly two years of design improvements, plus room for more cores (though not cache, an interesting problem) due to the process shrink. I expect the base M3 to significantly outperform all versions of the M2 Pro on CPU, and probably on GPU as well. This is going to present some real difficulties if they ship the MBA and not the MBP.
Fortunately, they have a potential solution to this. Ship everything, and leave the M2s in place at a lower price point.
What will they *actually* do? I dunno. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on the 13/15 MBA shipping October, along with the 13" MBP and the iMac. 14/16MBP, Studio, and Pro either the same time (not too likely) or quickly after that (November-January). Of course, I've been wrong already this year (about the M3 before/at WWDC).
BTW there are lots of interesting questions about the M3 that we have no insight into yet. For me the biggest question is, will they bump up CPU and GPU core counts on the base chip? You can argue that they don't really need more CPU cores on the base model, but they're getting so cheap in area, I can imagine adding a couple more, especially given where Intel/AMD are going these days. They can *definitely* use more GPU, and I do expect more GPU cores (as well as better perf/core) on the base M3. Though if core size goes up a bunch due to HRT, then maybe not.
Yes, if Apple continues recent past practices, we'll get the 13" MBA and MBP, and maybe an iMac because it's stupidly overdue. But consider: The upgrade from M1 to M2 was modest, and even so, a 13" MBA came dangerously close to the performance of the baseline 14" M1 MBP. There's no doubt that that cannibalized some sales.
The M2 -> M3 performance increase will be MUCH larger. Maybe not as large as the bump from Intel to M1 in 2020, but large - you've got the move to N3, and then on top of that roughly two years of design improvements, plus room for more cores (though not cache, an interesting problem) due to the process shrink. I expect the base M3 to significantly outperform all versions of the M2 Pro on CPU, and probably on GPU as well. This is going to present some real difficulties if they ship the MBA and not the MBP.
Fortunately, they have a potential solution to this. Ship everything, and leave the M2s in place at a lower price point.
What will they *actually* do? I dunno. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on the 13/15 MBA shipping October, along with the 13" MBP and the iMac. 14/16MBP, Studio, and Pro either the same time (not too likely) or quickly after that (November-January). Of course, I've been wrong already this year (about the M3 before/at WWDC).
BTW there are lots of interesting questions about the M3 that we have no insight into yet. For me the biggest question is, will they bump up CPU and GPU core counts on the base chip? You can argue that they don't really need more CPU cores on the base model, but they're getting so cheap in area, I can imagine adding a couple more, especially given where Intel/AMD are going these days. They can *definitely* use more GPU, and I do expect more GPU cores (as well as better perf/core) on the base M3. Though if core size goes up a bunch due to HRT, then maybe not.
This is just wrong. The M1/2 Pro and Max are not chiplets, they are monolithic. The Ultra is also not chiplets exactly - it's two Maxes connected with TSMC's InFO-LI - which is actually "gluing together after the fact".
It is true that smaller chips tend to come first on new process nodes (mostly due to yield issues, but also plausibly because the larger chips need more time to validate). That might not happen with the M3 because Apple's already had test chips in hand for a while, so it's possible they are able to launch the base, Pro, and Max chips all at the same time. We'll see.
I don't really understand the purpose of the 13" Macbook Pro any more. It's the only Macbook that still has a touchbar and aside from that the 13" Macbook Air meets or beats all of its specs at a lower price. They should probably just discontinue it or am I missing something.
He did the radical cleanup
1) in part because he thought it was too confusing to know which Mac to pick (the Performa 5215CD? The Power Macintosh 4400? Who knows!), but also
2) in part because Apple was running out of money and simply didn't have the bandwidth to serve so many different markets.
Arguably, neither of those applies. 2 certainly doesn't; they're financially quite stable. As for 1, no, we don't have the simple 1998 2x2 grid of consumer/pro, desktop/laptop, but we didn't have that as soon as he introduced the Cube, nor did we have it when he introduced the mini. Today, we have:
Desktop | Mac mini | iMac | Mac Studio | Mac Pro |
Laptop | Air | 13-inch Pro | 14/16-inch Pro |
The only really odd one there is the 13-inch Pro. I wish they'd give it a different name, but it's probably still swimming just between "not worth investing in"
I don't think so — the 14-inch is $700 more. The gap shrinks to $300 once you have them configured similarly, but people proficient enough to configure a device like that are probably also clear in the differences. One is fanless and intended for the masses; the other has a fan but is beefier. I don't think that's a huge problem.
This is true, and I think it's a sign of 1) them anticipating extremely low volume (so they have to make it up in a price bump) and 2) them not wanting the SKU in the first place. Either in terms of not wanting a Mac Pro at all, or preferring a Mac Pro that offers more of a USP, such as the mythical M2 Quad.
Either way, I don't think they're happy that there's a $3,000 gap that… buys you nothing other than a bunch of internal PCIe slots (which don't even offer full bandwidth, due to limitations of the M2 Ultra).
This is all true in theory, but in practice, the 13-inch Pro sells. It's a surprisingly popular product, probably because people want "Pro" in the name but also don't want a $2k starting price.
I don't think all of Apple is happy that it exists. Certainly the engineers would probably prefer if they're either all-in on the Touch Bar or kill it off. Marketing might not be happy because it's a confusing line-up. Sales is apparently happy.
I think you'd find within a few days that the notch doesn't bother you at all, and the fanless design (and thinness) is really nice.
Unclear to me what makes you so sure of this. The M2 seemed to be slightly late. If they're aiming for something like an 18-month schedule for the M series, it's October 2020, April 2022 (actually June), October 2023. That seems reasonable to me. It would also likely mean they're skipping the A16 cores.