Mark Gurman of Bloomberg News reports that Apple could skip the M3 generation altogether for some Macs, notably the Mac mini, by launching a new M4 Mac mini as soon as this year.
Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
To be clear, Gurman does not have specific insider information confirming that Apple is planning to skip the M3 mini. But based on Apple’s assumed timeline of late 2024 to early 2025 for the M4 mini, he believes it’s “probably safe to say” that there isn’t enough space on the timeline for An M3 mini will be marketed by then.
This wouldn’t be the first time that an Apple Silicon Mac skipped a chip generation: the 24-inch iMac was never updated with the M2, going directly from the M1 to the M3. The Mac Pro also skipped the M1 series, switching from Intel chips to the M2.
But if the M4 comes out by the end of 2024, the turnaround would be much faster than what we’ve seen so far for other Apple Silicon chips. About a year and a half passed between the introduction of the first M1 Macs in late 2020 and the first M2 Macs in summer 2022; approximately the same amount of time passed between mid-2022 and the late 2023 introduction of the first M3 Macs.
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Taken from MacDailyNews: With each passing day, M3 looks more and more like a placeholder – and a short one at that.
See also: Apple plotting radical overhaul of entire Mac lineup powered by AI-focused M4 chips – April 11, 2024
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