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M4 Mac Studio and Mac Pro Launching in Mid to Late 2025

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Mac Studio and Mac Pro machines that are equipped with Apple's next-generation M4 chips will be some of the last Macs to be refreshed with the new chip technology, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said in this week's Power On newsletter.

M4-Mac-Studio-Feature.jpg

The Mac Studio is set to come out somewhere around the middle of the year in 2025, which could mean a June debut at WWDC, while the Mac Pro will come out sometime in the second half of 2025. The distinction between the middle of the year and the second half of 2025 suggests the Mac Pro is likely to launch around fall 2025.

Both the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio will use Apple's M4 Ultra chips, which have yet to be announced. So far, we've only seen the standard M4 chip, which has come out in the iPad Pro.

Apple is gearing up to release new MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac machines with M4 chips in October, with the MacBook Air to follow sometime in early 2025.

Article Link: M4 Mac Studio and Mac Pro Launching in Mid to Late 2025
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/07/m4-mac-studio-m4-mac-pro-2025/
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Reactions: danbuter, StoneyG, Peter_M and 2 others
Apple surprised every one by launching M4 with iPad Pro before MBP and MBA. May be the M5 /max/ultra will launch with Studio, and Pro.
 
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The Studio and desktop Pro simply aren’t high-volume sellers for Apple and are prioritized accordingly. It’s a bummer in the sense that it’s exciting to see niche high-performance hardware from an enthusiast perspective, but Apple is a very mainstream consumer behemoth now. It’s astounding they even released the Vision Pro in its current configuration.
 
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krell100 said:
The weird release schedule from Apple continues.. unfortunately by the time pros see an M4 Ultra the M5 will start appearing.
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not really
either we won't see M5 anytime soon, or it will be minor release like M2
3nm is still so expensive nobody beside apple wants to touch it. nvidia stays at 5nm even for their 80%+ margin AI accelerators. AMD went with 4nm (a 5nm update basically).
2nm is probably 2026 iphone territory at the earliest
M4 already packed everything Arm architecture has to offer

so nothing really interesting will happen in the next 24 months

and theres possibility M4 Ultra is gonna be a completely different animal than the macbook M4 chips, hence the delay. apple is already rumored to use M2 Ultra in their own server hardware for AI stuff. if they want to stay competitive against companies using nvidia, they need tensor cores inside their GPU cluster just like RT cores, not small separate NPUs.

AI workstation could be a killer feature of next gen Mac Studio/Pro
 
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TechnoMonk said:
Apple surprised every one by launching M4 with iPad Pro before MBP and MBA. May be the M5 /max/ultra will launch with Studio, and Pro.
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thats one of my theories: M5 is gonna stick with 3nm and same CPU, but switch from NPU to in-GPU tensor cores (like nvidia and AMD are doing) which would open massive AI performance uplift and be major selling point for people working with AI models.
would make sense to release it in studio/pro first.
 
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goobot said:
Don’t understand what’s so difficult about just swapping out a processor.
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Because it's not easy and yet, extremely difficult.

If you think Ultra chip is just connecting two Max chips, then it's totally wrong. It's all about the die size and which affects the manufacturing cost and yield.

First of all, Max chip itself is a huge chip which makes it expensive and since only Apple can use it, it's gonna be way more expensive. But combing two Max chips is another problem. Actually, this is a major problem with Apple Silicon M series.

image.png

Making Ultra chips is multiple times more difficult to mass produce because Ultra chip itself is huge. Max chip itself is quite huge and yet you need to sacrifice some of them due to the chip yielding. Bigger the chip, lower the yield. You may think it's just connecting two Max chips but in reality, it's not. We are talking about a whole new chip since you need silicons to connect each chip on a wafer again. Connecting and swapping chip is easy? Tell that to TSMC.

As a result, Ultra chip is extremely expensive and yet difficult to mass produce. Again, since only Apple use it, there is no way they can use Ultra chips other than Mac Studio and Mac Pro which makes low profit. I would say Apple is literally losing a lot of money for making and selling Ultra chip based Mac.

This is why M series design is totally failed for high-end chips and go beyond Ulra. They literally cant make a powerful chip due to SoC based design. Connecting four Max chips? Good luck with that. This is why Apple couldn't make any M3 Ultra and wait till 2025 after M2 Ultra.

At this point, SoC will NEVER success for high-end chip and they really need to change the fundamental design such as 3DFabric which allow connecting dies on a same chip. Otherwise, I would not expect anything from Apple. Besides, Apple is way below Nvidia's performance in terms of GPU so far.
 
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Reactions: asdfjkl;, jhfenton, skabichevsky and 8 others
To me, that kind of implies an M4 Mac Studio and an M5 Mac Pro. I have a hard time believing Apple would launch an M4 Mac Pro after the initial M5 products launch.
 
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Seoras said:
I'm buying the new Mac Mini, maxed out, end of this month.
Then, depending on how great the M5 Studio is in 9-12 months, I'll sell it and upgrade.
It won't be an M4. It'll be an M5 Max/Ultra. Why else would Mac17,1 & Mac17,2 already be in the code strings?
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Doing the same ^^^. I have Mac Studio M1 Ultra which is great for my dev work. Looking forward to mini and then upgraded Studio. A lot of development involves staring at code and thinking, but build times really add up during the day. I also have a bare-spec MBA M3 to gap-fill on the road. Everything in Apple classic silver!
 
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Seoras said:
I'm buying the new Mac Mini, maxed out, end of this month.
Then, depending on how great the M5 Studio is in 9-12 months, I'll sell it and upgrade.
It won't be an M4. It'll be an M5 Max/Ultra. Why else would Mac17,1 & Mac17,2 already be in the code strings?
Click to expand...

Hmm....that's an interesting thought!

I'm a bit frustrated with the lag in Mac Studio releases and I am also now considering an M4 Pro Mini if it is released next month.

If Apple skips an M4 Max/Ultra Studio and goes straight to an M5 Studio even if this is 12 months away (Oct 2025), then they will move the Studio (& maybe Mac Pro) into the "halo product" position for version N+1, that leads the mainstream version "N" Pro and Max SoCs in the MacBook Pro.
 
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Yea no way they release a highend M4 product if the entry level M5 product is out mid 2025. They will likely make it it M5 max/ultra if they push it so far out.
 
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