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Gurman: No New Mac Studio and Mac Pro Until Mid-2025

It's annoying, but it's not like the old Intel days where anyone looking to buy a Mac Pro was spending money on bad, out of date hardware. Between the MacBook Pros and M2 Mac Studio, I suspect most people would be able to find a current Mac to replace their current one which will be as capable as they need.

Ideally everything would move from generation to generation at the same time, but I'm guessing its not possible from a manufacturing and supply chain perspective.
 
Joshuaorange said:
Is it just me or is the current lineup of computers/iPads a complete mess? I haven’t seen specs on the M4 but I suspect Apple royally screwed the pooch with that one. $6k Mac Pro 2 generations behind a $999 iPad that doesn’t even run OSX. 🤦‍♂️
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Ever since Apple Silicon, it’s been “Choose the form factor, choose the features/ports, choose how much you want to pay/performance” I think it’s actually less confusing because the core part of a generation, even through to the tablets, provide similar single thread performance across the board.
 
Who knows, the Mac Studio and M-based Mac Mini are too new products to make heads or tails of these rumors.

The bigger problem is the economic downturn in the Western world, which is putting a major dent in Apple's sales, combined with Apple's ever increasing prices.

This problem is even more compounded here in Norway, caused by current currency rates, so Apple products are getting ridiculously expensive. Many people can't afford these products anymore, or at least waiting as long as possible before upgrading. In general Apple products must have become ca. 80-90% more expensive here the last decade.
 
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Tdude96 said:
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense that Apple would have an AI-focused event with their A4 chip being their AI workhorse, but not have their A4 chip available in Macs where it could be most effectively put to use for AI-based workflows.
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Anyone really needing high performance AI, acquired the computers with the most AI cores, 32 for the Studio and Pro. I wonder if the performance of those 32 cooled cores still beats the M4’s 16 passive cooled cores?
 
darthaddie said:
Gurman is Siri. Get’s it wrong most of the time.
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Gurman is right on the stuff that we’d all get right (well except when we were sure there would be an event, because there’s once every year, but he wasn’t). I’d bet if you focus on his hail mary predictions, the accuracy would be 50%, which is what anyone just typing random words into a newsletter would get :)
 
ikir said:
You have no idea of global market numbers.
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They said they suspect, didn't claim to know. If you know as much as you think you do, instead of being condescending, why don't you post something informative instead?
 
zoomp said:
TSMC does not want to keep producing a problematic generation of 3 nm. They expect Apple to move on.
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TSMC will do whatever Apple pays them to do.

The Mac Studio/Mac Pro/Mac Mini aren't on 3nm yet and, Gurman or no, it's looking increasingly possible that they'll skip M3 entirely.

As for "no Mac Studio/Pro this year"... that's plausible, since the M4 Ultra (or whatever replaces it) is likely to be the last M4 series chip launched (as it was with the M1 and M2 series).

if the M4 Max is sufficiently power-efficient to run in a Mac Mini enclosure then it's possible that the Mac Studio "max" will no longer have a place, and there could just be a Mac Studio Ultra.

Re. other comments - the whole purpose of the Apple Silicon "Mac Pro" is to be a "Mac Studio with slots" - there's a small but deep-pocketed niche of customers who need PCIe for specialist networking or A/V cards and/or masses of internal storage, and the M2 Ultra Mac Pro has more PCIe bandwidth & support for x2 and x4 cards than you can get with an external (and expensive) TB to PCIe housing. I'm not necessarily defending the cost, but if you don't need non-GPU PCIe it's irrelevant to you.
 
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Presumably this will then be for the M5.

This is how Apple seems to be doing things, a bit like that iMac jumping from M1 to M3, and the iPad Pros jumping from M2 to M4. Some products leapfrog processor generations and you can generally expect an update roughly every 2 years.

Both the Mac Studio and Mac Pro were updated a year ago, and 2 years will be guess what... mid 2025. This is completely expected.
 
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daneoni said:
Well the fact that they put the M4 in the new iPads probably means they've internally killed the M3 series altogether. And plan to skip to M4.

It will take time to get the M4 Max and Ultra ready hence late this year and early to mid next
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I think there are two main possibilities:

[1] The M3 Ultra was built and will go into the Studio and Pro at WWDC. The M4 launch was an anomaly created by a combination of need (tandem OLED) and opportunity (N3E).

[2] The M3 Ultra was not built. The M4 launch was not an anomaly, and M4 Pro on N3E will launch at WWDC in the Mac Mini. M4 Max and M4 Ultra will launch together in late 2024 or early 2025 on N3P.
 
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bradman83 said:
Did Apple ever explicitly state that, or was that always just an assumption? Apple’s publicly stated they switched to their own chips for performance per watt. It was analysts and forums readers who presumed it was because of Intel‘s update delays or cost (I chuckle at the Mac Rumors readers who claimed Apple’s own chips would cost less despite having to shoulder R&D costs and buying the most bleeding edge process).
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I remember someone from apple marketing defending that they didn’t use every intel update available because the marginal performance increases didn’t make it worthwhile. It was in a podcast, I don’t remember which one, maybe Gruber?

And at the time it could even be true.
 
Honestly, I’m not even sure about the M4. It takes a long time to make chip architecture. And with the M3 being close followed by the M4 I’m wondering if Apple actually fixed the go fetch flaw i’m thinking the M4 might still be vulnerable and the M5 might be the chip that won’t be. I just can’t see a new architecture moving that fast and be able to get rid of the issues of the M1 2 and 3 and that quickly as the M4 and M3 were probably being produced alongside each other. So I suspect the M4 is still vulnerable and that’s going to be tested quickly and if it is still vulnerable apples CPU lineup is looking more messy than ever.
 
theluggage said:
if the M4 Max is sufficiently power-efficient to run in a Mac Mini enclosure then it's possible that the Mac Studio "max" will no longer have a place, and there could just be a Mac Studio Ultra.
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M4 Max theoretically could run in a Mac mini but Apple likely won’t go there. M4 Max makes much more sense in a Mac Studio not only because of the thermal advantages of Mac Studio, but also because of the additional ports.

It also makes more sense from a marketing perspective.

tenthousandthings said:
I think there are two main possibilities:

[1] The M3 Ultra was built and will go into the Studio and Pro at WWDC. The M4 launch was an anomaly created by a combination of need (tandem OLED) and opportunity (N3E).

[2] The M3 Ultra was not built. The M4 launch was not an anomaly, and M4 Pro on N3E will launch at WWDC in the Mac Mini. M4 Max and M4 Ultra will launch together in late 2024 or early 2025 on N3P.
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Possibility #3 is what I believe: M3 Ultra will never exist in retail and Mac Studio will jump directly to M4 Max and M4 Ultra, and Mac mini will jump to M4… in 2025. No Mac Studio or Mac mini at WWDC 2024.
 
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Chuckeee said:
Along the same vein, I could envision a near term M4 Mini as a replacement for both m2 mini and the M2Pro mini.

The desktop market is too small and some consolidation of the Apple desktop product line makes sense.

The number of mini sales is relatively small so the impact on the existing M4 chip production would be negligible

It is only the M4 chip, so it does not require bringing a larger M4 chip to market sooner.

It provides a greater distinction between the mini and studio desktop product lines

It wouldn’t provide any competition to the remaining M2 studio products

It would get the M4 into the hands of developers with MacOS compatibility.

It will allow closing down of M2Pro chip production.
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Or, since the M3 generation broke the direct relationship between the Pro and Max variants, we could see both the M4 Mini and the M4 Pro Mini at WWDC.

The Max and Ultra make more sense launching together (later this year or early next year), especially if the Ultra is still 2x Max.
 
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JimmyG said:
One would think it would become obvious to Apple that there is a broad (and, now, disenfranchised) 27" iMac user base that's just never, ever, going to purchase a Studio. Their unit sales numbers bear out that it's a product that just hasn't caught-on with the Mac masses. What Apple is, is "all-in-one machines to rule them all", be it iPhones, iPads, Macbooks and iMacs...it's who they are, it's their DNA, and it's what folks expect them from them. I know I do! :)

The best (I can figure) for Apple to get themselves out of this desktop mess that they've created is to create an 18-month M-Series cadence...new 32" 6K and 42" 8K iMacs getting the "whole enchilada" of M4 releases, Studio getting M5, iMac M6, Studio M7, ad nauseam. No one needs to upgrade their desktops every year with a new chipset, 36-months seems like a reasonable, er, gap. Well, IMHO.
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Agreed

It's so silly

An actually friendly product here would be 27" and 32" iMacs with doors on the back for a user to add more storage (NVMe slot, like in a PS5) and RAM
 
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Sun Baked said:
Disappointed that there are no AI Afterburner card rumors for 2024 ...
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Why would Apple bother?

I'm quite confident that the Afterburner wasn't really planned to be a product.

It was exactly what it looked like: An Apple Silicon design testbed using an FPGA. Someone at Apple must have looked at it and asked "hey, we could really just ship this silicon development board as a product?" and nobody could come up with a reason not to, so they shipped it.

The majority of what the Afterburner was is now just parts inside of Apple Silicon.

now...

Apple could make a dedicated AI accelerator board, yeah... but maybe they just don't see a market for that yet?
 
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SpotOnT said:
So the Mac Mini will get M4 Pro while the Studio is on M2 Max?
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Exactly what I wondered. They might as well just can the Studio and Pro if that is the case. How hard can a basic upgrade be?!? Treat the product lines with a vague bit of interest or respect, or just put them out of their misery.
 
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What are the odds they finally bring out a Studio with M4 Max, then one month later bring out a MacBook Pro with M5 Max that sh*ts on it? 😅
 
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ric22 said:
Exactly what I wondered. They might as well just can the Studio and Pro if that is the case. How hard can a basic upgrade be?!? Treat the product lines with a vague bit of interest or respect, or just put them out of their misery.
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Agreed. I have four Mac Studios now and frankly I’m getting a bit fed up with Apple. My M3 Max does things better than my top of the line M2 Ultra. Specifically items related to GPU processing.

I’m tired of my grandma getting better treatment getting newer chips. Apple needs to focus more on the pro market. It causes a cascade and does impact even the Air.

If devs and pros leave those Apps will become dead and it will impact what anyone can run on macOS.
 
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