The Apple M3 series of chips debuted late last year in the MacBook Pro range and recently made the jump to the MacBook Air M3. As impressive as the M3 series is, I have no doubt that some of you will be eager to see what’s next. The good news is that the M4 chips may be ready to go next year.
The market analysis company has published a new “estimated roadmap” canallys (through TechnologyRadar), and suggests that the Apple M4 chip could launch in the first quarter of 2025. While this is not a guarantee of what Apple’s plans are, these are estimates designed to show various companies what their competitors may be doing, in this case. Apple, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm.
The silicon war is heating up
Until now, Apple has typically left a gap of around 18 months between new generations of its M-series chips. So a launch in late Q1 or early Q2 2025 would match that quite well. Whether this will actually happen is another question, and Apple isn’t one to release new products on anyone else’s timeline.
Canalys also predicts that the M4 chips will have a big focus on AI, which isn’t a big surprise. AI PCs are very popular now, and in recent years there has been a push to offer better and more powerful AI-enabled chips. In fact, Apple is said to be doing just that with the iPhone 16 and A18 chipsets, both of which are rumored to offer a vastly improved neural engine.
Apple also made a big push into AI with the MacBook Air M3, which features an improved neural engine. Apple even went so far as to declare it “the world’s best consumer laptop for AI.” So it really is almost guaranteed that the M4 will offer even more AI features and performance.
We can probably expect many more hardware updates to the M4 chips as well. The M3’s performance cores were 30% faster than the M1, while the efficiency cores were 50% faster. Not to mention the graphics performance (hardware-accelerated ray tracing came to the M3) and power efficiency that Apple Silicon has been known for since its inception.
But at this point it’s impossible to say how much better the performance and power efficiency of the M4 chip will be. But if iPhone 16 rumors are anything to go by, Apple could be pushing for more AI processing on the device instead of offloading that work to the cloud. We’ll have to wait and see what additional information appears over the next 12 months.
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