Yesterday, October 28, Apple’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering announced the start of a series of Mac-related announcements: It ‘s a big week for the Mac, and this morning we begin a series of three new product announcements that we’ll be unveiling day by day. After yesterday’s announcement of the iMac, we’ll be unveiling the M4 generations of the MacBook Pro with the M4 chip. Our attention will be focused on the arrival (or not) of the as yet unannounced M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. The Mac mini is expected to lose size and undergo a major redesign. We don’t know if the Mac Studio will also be updated. But with prices ranging from €2,400 to €4,300 for M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips, it would be surprising to see Apple do without. Last July, rumors suggested a 2025 update for this range.
The potential of the Apple M4 chip
The M4 chip, manufactured with 3-nanometer etching technology by TSMC, is said by Apple to offer considerably improved energy efficiency and processing capacity. With its focus on artificial intelligence, the accelerated timetable would have put an end to plans for the arrival of M3 Ultra chips. Even the Apple community is skeptical about the M4 chip. As announced when it was made official, the M4 is indeed 25% faster than the M3, and 50% faster than the M2, as promised by Apple, putting it on a par with the M2 Pro and M3 Pro. The gain in frequency is well known, since the M4 runs at 4.4 Ghz compared with 4.05 Ghz for the M3, an 8.6% increase in frequency.
In other words, the addition of 2 low-cost cores (4 4 to 4 6) yields a gain of around 16%, the increase in frequency of around 9%, and the efficiency of the micro-architecture is virtually nil compared to the M3… It remains to be seen how the (marketing?) magic of AI can work. We’ll have to see how Apple can combine all this to present real advances to users. When you think back to the last iPhone presentation on this subject, it’s hard to get your hopes up. But, as has always been the case with Apple, we can always expect a real surprise.