Macs With M5 Chips Expected to Launch in This Order

[eva2000]

Why would anyone buy a M4 Max or M4 Ultra Mac Studio, if the M5 versions are coming out shortly after the M4 Mac Studios launch?

With 4yrs of Trump tariffs, M5 might be priced a lot higher than M4 is now. M4 owners might profit from selling their 2nd hand M4s between 2025-2028

But with M4 having such excellent performance, I'd imagine Apple will have their work cut out for them in M5 marketing and feature set decisions to convince M4 users to upgrade.

 

[vantelimus]

I think this is because the more advanced chips take more time to bring to production, and they ship in far lower volume. An M5 MacBook Pro will greatly outsell an M5 Max Mac Studio, probably by more than 10x.

All the numbers you find about Mac units sales are estimates because Apple doesn't reveal actuals. MacBook Pro unit sales are commonly estimated to be around 50%, with the Mac Studio coming in at 1%. So that would be 50x for all Mac Studio models. Given that the Max chip is the low end Studio, it could easily account for less than 25% of the total Studio sales, which would push the difference to 200x or higher, a stunning difference.

 

[Tdude96]

Don't be surprised if M6 turns out to be somewhat faster than M5 but not as fast as M7.

Have you considered applying to Bloomberg? This is far more insightful long-term analysis than they've been getting. If you can successfully predict +/- 1 month of Apple's next flagship iPhone release you'll be a shoo-in!

 

[Dan From Canada]

What about the M25 chips?

 

[vantelimus]

What about the M25 chips?

Some of us will be dead before then.

 

[Alameda]

All the numbers you find about Mac units sales are estimates because Apple doesn't reveal actuals. MacBook Pro unit sales are commonly estimated to be around 50%, with the Mac Studio coming in at 1%. So that would be 50x for all Mac Studio models. Given that the Max chip is the low end Studio, it could easily account for less than 25% of the total Studio sales, which would push the difference to 200x or higher, a stunning difference.

Even if Apple had plenty of financial incentive, it simply takes longer to validate the more complex versions of these CPU’s. The packaging is more complex, the thermal management is more complex, the software, and, especially, the chip validation and test is more complex and takes longer to get fully signed off.

And I don’t think Apple’s serious about the server or high end workstation markets at all, not on a whole lot of levels. They understand the requirements of artists really well, but they don’t seem to have any interest in going after Dell and HP’s enterprise businesses.

 

[9081094]

I love all the Apple apologists around here saying well since it’s only 1% of sales it’s okay for Apple to half-ass their pro line. I’m as big of an Apple fan as anyone. I have 4 Mac Studios nearly maxed out for goodness sakes. But holy cow. You know what would improve that 1%? Actually showing pro users you give a damn. I went back to Windows after the awful trash can Mac Pro.

Almost came back in 2019 but knew Apple Silicon was on the way and didn’t want to get that Mac Pro. Mac Studio M1 and M2 were great. But their attitudes to the pro market are starting to be like the trash can again.

If Apple wants their pro market to matter they need to give it more attention. Otherwise I’m looking at windows AGAIN in a couple years. If that long. Will see how new AMD and NVIDIA 50 series compares with my workload.

All this constant talk about how desktops have matured isn’t stopping AMD, Intel or NVIDIA from keeping up in the pro market. There is still NO ANSWER from Apple for a majority of workflows to a 13900k and even an RTX 4070. There you go. Mac Studio and Mac Pro has SIGNIFICANTLY more room to grow.

And other than running better on battery and, again just SOME WORKFLOWS, Mac Laptops still have a lot of room to grow too.

It’s not only Mac, but to some extent it’s happening to their whole product line.

Neglect or minimal incremental updates are the standard these days at Apple. Anyone noticed hilarious example is that Apple showed of iOS 18. Then it took Samsung exactly 2 months to copy the look and feel of iOS 18 with even better implemented features.

Apple as a whole has becoming a joke. Even get rid of greedy Timmy or show any potential you got.

As a pro I wouldn’t invest in the platform anymore. They’ve showed time and time again they’re not willing to compete. They only enter new markets like a swarm of locusts. When there is no money left to harvest they go to another area, totally neglecting the old ones. Not a company for sustainability doing business with. Final Cut Pro, motion, logic…. Incremental upgrades. A shame for a company sitting on a stockpile of money.

Also a shame they haven’t managed to be at the forefront of emerging technologies. Their AI offerings are a joke, as is their personal assistant Siri.

Get rid off Timmy, he made the company rich and lazy. Under Timmy no vision or heart for innovation or customers. Only money 🙁

 

[macbookj0e]

Why is apples best selling Mac now the last to get a new generation chip when it used to be the first? Seems weird to me the MBA is getting the M4 a year after the iPad Pro.

 

[hoorayforhollywood]

Hope to be proven wrong, but I don’t think the Mini or the iMac will get M5.

Maybe a two year cycle for those unless they decide to make the Mini a welcomed member at the top table as a power machine. The iMac will always be a consumer product.

 

[eva2000]

Why is apples best selling Mac now the last to get a new generation chip when it used to be the first? Seems weird to me the MBA is getting the M4 a year after the iPad Pro.

Apple users who chase the latest and greatest and have the $$$ will end up getting lower base chips just because they can and then later upgrade to higher end chips again because they have $$$ = Apple wins having customers buy twice heh.

 

[Chuckeee]

Hope to be proven wrong, but I don’t think the Mini or the iMac will get M5.

Possibly but I would suspect Apple will switch off, iMac one year and then the mini the next. Not much attention for the M4 iMac so I would guess the iMac will get M5 next year but skip M6, while the mini will skip the M5 but will get an M6 update.

 

[chucker23n1]

I would generally set the expectation that desktops get updated with less priority than laptops.

 

[vantelimus]

Possibly but I would suspect Apple will switch off, iMac one year and then the mini the next. Not much attention for the M4 iMac so I would guess the iMac will get M5 next year but skip M6, while the mini will skip the M5 but will get an M6 update.

Interesting strategy. It makes sense for consumer product lines. There really isn't much reason to upgrade to the latest and fastest these days unless you are professional -- and even then it doesn't always make sense.

 

[bradman83]

Why is apples best selling Mac now the last to get a new generation chip when it used to be the first? Seems weird to me the MBA is getting the M4 a year after the iPad Pro.

The MBA line is a consumer laptop and is therefore meant to be less performance-oriented vs. pro laptops and consumer desktops.

 

[cocoua]

Apple Intelligence runs all the way back on M1.

Indeed! this first interaction of Apple Int. requieres 8GB of memory to work... today. But it've just started.

Apple said they want to make AI work local the most they can, so this means, hardware must meet this requirements. In the meanwhile, they will be using private cloud.... but eventually, ROM and RAM (and chips) would need to adapt to the new stuff it's coming (local LLMs...) so the M4 was a must to be ahead/update with competition.

Summarizing emails and "cheap" photo tricks are OK, but AI is meant to bring real new stuff.

 

[Ethosik]

Apple users who chase the latest and greatest and have the $$$ will end up getting lower base chips just because they can and then later upgrade to higher end chips again because they have $$$ = Apple wins having customers buy twice heh.

Nope. We will just move to PC. Again. AMD processor and NVIDIA GPU still blow away anything Apple has to offer. They don’t even have an answer to four year old hardware yet.

 

[buggz]

Nope. We will just move to PC. Again. AMD processor and NVIDIA GPU still blow away anything Apple has to offer. They don’t even have an answer to four year old hardware yet.

And yet, I read this:

Apple MacBook Pro 16 M4 Max review - The M4 Max is one of the fastest mobile processors

Notebookcheck has tested the MacBook Pro 16 2024 with the M4 Max, which has 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores.

www.notebookcheck.net

I am being serious here, as I am STILL trying to figure how to upgrade from my old PC.
Sooo, confusing...

 

[Ethosik]

And yet, I read this:

Apple MacBook Pro 16 M4 Max review - The M4 Max is one of the fastest mobile processors

Notebookcheck has tested the MacBook Pro 16 2024 with the M4 Max, which has 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores.

www.notebookcheck.net

I am being serious here, as I am STILL trying to figure how to upgrade from my old PC.
Sooo, confusing...

This is about desktops not laptops.

The performance you get from a studio Ultra is quite absurd especially if they don’t maintain it and treat the pro users right. I can get the best Windows system out there and still have a lot of money left for the cost of these Macs. And the performance is so much better.

 

[bzgnyc2]

And yet, I read this:

Apple MacBook Pro 16 M4 Max review - The M4 Max is one of the fastest mobile processors

Notebookcheck has tested the MacBook Pro 16 2024 with the M4 Max, which has 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores.

www.notebookcheck.net

I am being serious here, as I am STILL trying to figure how to upgrade from my old PC.
Sooo, confusing...

It is -- you become a "systems engineer". Which some people enjoy and...

What I think is interesting is that as the Mac architecture has diverged from the traditional PC one, it's becoming harder to compare performance. PC's have more range across more dimensions but Macs are basically untouchable in a few niches.

For example, building a PC with 48 - 144 GB of VRAM can get quite expensive. Most people don't need this but it's critical for running certain AI and LLM models locally. The M4/32GB, M4 Pro/64GB, and M2 Max/Ultra/64-192GB can be hard to match at their price points for VRAM-intense applications (where the Mac can make up to 75% of its RAM -- and perhaps 90% with a little bit of hacking -- available as VRAM). On the other hand once you do invest in an nVidia GPU with the needed VRAM, they are typically multiple times faster.

On the other hand, if you need 256GB+ RAM for non-GPU work, Apple has no solution since they dropped the 2019 Mac Pro. And even getting to 128GB or more is generally quite a bit more expensive on the Mac. On the other other hand, no one really competes with Mac's single-threaded performance...nor overall CPU performance in TDP-constrained environments.

 

[jouster]

What about the M25 chips?

They'll be very fast, unless you live in London.

 

[ls1dreams]

Anyone want to place bets on what % uplift we'll see for single threaded scores? (GB6, cinebench, etc)? over or under 20%?

 

[chucker23n1]

Anyone want to place bets on what % uplift we'll see for single threaded scores? (GB6, cinebench, etc)? over or under 20%?

Under is more likely.

Apple had some early years with very high uplift.

But in recent years, that has decreased a bit. A15, 16, 17 and M2 and M3 were closer to 10% than 20%.

A18 / M4 is once again a high uplift.

But we haven't seen anything in a while like, say, the A10, with 50%, the A9, with 64%, and the A6, with a whopping 166% (the A6 was the one that changed from ARM Cortex to an Apple design, so it's arguably the first "Apple Silicon").

Therefore, my guess is A19 / M5 will be closer to 10%, and maybe we'll see a cadence of two years (A20 / M6), or even four years (A22 / M8) where we get a 20% uplift.

 

[ls1dreams]

I'm on a 13 mini now looks like the A15 was kind of a bummer year. The A18 seems like it was a really good bump. My guess is this next year will be modest but then in 2026 maybe the A20 will have a bigger jump. Who knows though.

 

[Admiral]

That will result in the usual year-over-year performance and power efficiency improvements over the M4 series of chips.

What's "the usual" year-over-year performance and power efficiency improvement, again?

 

[Admiral]

I always had a pretty maxed out iMac but I'm finding the base mini 4 does almost anything I need. it completely trounces my last iMac. I definitely can hit the ram ceiling easily but as long as I'm not running with a ton of stuff open at once I'm good.

The only thing that has challenged my 32GB M2 Max Mac Studio is AI. This round I am gagging to buy a 128+GB M4 Ultra and put the LLMs to work.