Looking to boost sluggish computer sales, Apple is preparing to overhaul its entire Mac line powered by a new family of M4 Apple Silicon processors designed to highlight artificial intelligence features.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Apple is looking to update every Mac model with it, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been announced.
The new Macs are underway at a critical time. After peaking in 2022, Mac sales fell 27% in the last fiscal year, which ended in September. In the holiday period, revenue from the computer line was flat… Apple also is playing catch-up in AI, where it’s seen as a laggard to Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other tech peers. The new chips are part of a broader push to weave AI capabilities into all its products.
Apple is aiming to release the updated computers beginning late this year and extending into early next year. There will be new iMacs, a low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, high-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, and Mac minis — all with M4 chips… As part of the upgrades, Apple is considering allowing its highest-end Mac desktops to support as much as a half-terabyte of memory. The current Mac Studio and Mac Pro top out at 192 gigabytes…
The big focus for Apple this year is to add new artificial intelligence features across its products. The company is planning to preview a slew of new features at its June developer conference. A large swath of those features are designed to run on the devices themselves — rather than in remote servers — and speedier chips will help drive those enhancements. Apple is also planning to make AI-focused upgrades to this year’s iPhone processor.
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MacDailyNews Take: Just bought a new M3-powered Mac? Our sympathies.
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Yawn. Just imagine if they did not upgrade their Macs.
Yeah, there’d be nothing for citizen shopkeepers to sell. Yawn.
“Just bought a new M3-powered Mac? Our sympathies.”
Apple always finds a way to make the previous gen undesirable.
This approach is engineered into the product’s roadmap years in advance.
Is apple still figuring out a way to add face id to their laptops?
I guess so.
“MacDailyNews Take: Just bought a new M3-powered Mac? Our sympathies.”
So wait… you feel sorry for people who’ve upgraded NOW instead of waiting an unknown period of time for an as-yet-unannounced product? Apple ALWAYS has something new in the works, and if everyone had your attitude then nobody would ever buy anything.
Just a comment on the relatively small gap between the M3 and expected M4 releases.
It’s a joke, loosen up.
AI focused- rebranding chromebooks or just making chrome the only browser?
Chrome sucks and so does Google!
“MacDailyNews Take: Just bought a new M3-powered Mac? Our sympathies.”
Like to thank you MDN for the warning and will be sure to purchase a fully loaded M3 MacBook Pro before the AI sure to be unnecessary kiddie crap, fake moves and Lord knows what stability. Not interested in this epic shift in computing particularly under woke King Kook…
So are you waiting for the M5 or the M6 then?
“will be sure to purchase a fully loaded M3 MacBook Pro before the AI”
I think that’s pretty clear for most people…
Want to upgrade but 24″ iMac is too small and I have no interest in buying a separate cpu and monitor.
So you’ll suffer with whatever outdated Mac you have – or worse, some crappy Windows PC – just because you don’t want to buy a separate monitor, when the Studio or even powered-up Mac mini are beasts? Hopefully Apple does launch at 32-inch iMac Pro, which would presumably do what you need, but it might be a long wait – maybe you just need to bite the bullet, hope it doesn’t blow your teeth or budget out, and get a Mac Studio or maxxed out mini and great monitor?
A 32″ iMac would suit me fine.
Not sure why everyone acts like old Mac gear is so “inferior”. I have a 2019 Intel powered 27″ iMac and it runs great. Does everything I need it to do and I don’t complain about its speed (unlike my Dell laptop w/Win11).
Just because Apple marches on, I refuse to join the “must have latest and greatest” bandwagon. I love their tech, and whatever machine I have, I will get my money’s worth out of it.
Yes, this is old tech by now, but really, it is easily still very serviceable. I have no intentions of switching to new hardware until I NEED to. Then I will thoroughly enjoy the new experience.
its not the upgrades that’s a bummer for Apple desktop users its the lack of a workstation performance chip. The reality is a 4 year old AMD Threadripper 3990x (64 core) still smokes the lastest M3 max by a long shot. The M3 max score on Cinebench R23 (real world) benchmark, the one apple uses on its on website, is 23,855. Meanwhile the Feb 2020 AMD Threadripper score on the same benchmark is 64,355. Let that sink in, a 4 year old CPU from AMD is 2.7 times faster than Apple’s current fastest CPU.
“AMD’s Threadripper Pro 7995WX 96-Core Cracks 100,000 in CineBench”
And the GPU front is even worse. Now that Nvidia has announced the Blackwell GPU platform and soon to be released 5090 GPUs, the distant between the Mac and windows performance gap is only getting worse. At the time of the M series first release, we where told how much faster M processors where then intel, but apple always referenced, at the time 5 year old intel chips that Apple refused to upgrade in the Intel Mac Pro, to cheat the numbers. The truth be told M series is a mobile design for the iPad with an embedded cpu/gpu with low power requirements idea for battery life. But for desktop work, where you can plug-into a wall, the M series are kinda a joke once you hit render. What the M series are good great at is Apple’s profitably. The can scale production across multiply products to lower cost. Instead of making dedicated Apple silicon for the Desktop, (thus lower profit margins), greedy apple with a 38% profit margin, choose to repurpose an existing product to cut cost; and you thought Apple’s ultra fusion architecture was innovation, the only innovation was it allowed apple to make higher profit margins be reusing an existing die. Two CPUs with embed, gpus, dedicated encoders, efficiency cores, (2x) 16 core neural engines were a wasted use of die space. But must have been more profitable for apple.
When apple touts the M4, if they preference their benchmarks with power per watt, and they compare it against the M1, then they are cooking the books to make it sound faster then it is.
My hope is finally Apple realizes that with the high AI computing demands, they can no longer fool the market. I hope M4 is a true desktop chip that can at least catch up to 2020 AMD. If apple choose to design a chip that used every nano for performance the professional market would pay for it.
… I’m building my AI datacenter with Apple silicon said no one ever. It must hurt apple to know that their scramble to catch up on AI will be powered by Nvidia.
its so telling that apple’s obsession with being greedy under the guise of being environmentally woke was the very blind spot that would dethrone them form being the market cap leader. This should be filed in the same folder as depending on manufacturing with a communist criminal state, the once great apple seems to be embracing stupidity by design.
Adding AI to everything can’t be a good thing.
Sigh. ‘AI’ is a 21st century canard, and this will not amount to anything but annoyance, which is already plentiful with modern Apple. Guess I’ll wait for the M5 or 6 when that is clear to the greedy and stupid idiots in the industry. 🙄 Remember when Apple used to lead rather than mindlessly follow? When the remaining Jobs/Ives juice was used up, this is what we get. And Cook is the fool approving it all. Apple has taken the best thing they’ve done in a long time (their chips) and basically told us they will henceforth render them a great deal less useful. Thanks, Apple. Thanks a lot. 🙄 I will upgrade my Mac and iPhone in 2030 when Gen Z capitulation has passed, if I upgrade within Apple at all. Edge = lost.