Apple’s Senior Vice President of Marketing, Greg Joswiak last week teased Apple’s plans for an “exciting week of announcements” this week. Joswiak said to “Mac your calendars,” indicating a week full of M4 Mac-related announcements next week beginning today.
Now, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman has provided a few details about the Macs we can expect to see debut this week. His comments come in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter.
Starting this week, the company will begin adding the M4 processor to the Mac lineup, helping set the stage for Apple’s artificial intelligence era.
The M4 processor, which first debut in Apple’s new iPad Pro lineup in May, will provide a significant leap in power got the Mac, allowing for improvements in how the Mac handles AI tasks and gaming.
Gurman says we can expect to see Apple unveil a 24-inch iMac and two versions of a revamped Mac mini, alongside a new 16-inch MacBook Pro and both low- and high-end configurations of the laptop’s 14-inch model. While the iMac will be equipped with an entry-level M4, the Mac mini will be available in versions with the base chip and the M4 Pro. The MacBook Pro, meanwhile, will boast higher-end M4 chips.
Gurman says users of M3 models should see a noticeable but not stunning overall CPU performance boost. However users of M1 machines should see improvement that could feel as significant as that they experienced with the first move from Intel machines to Apple Silicon chips.
Gurman noted that the M4 chips in the iPad Pro are as follows:
- One has nine CPU cores (three for high performance and six focused on power efficiency) and 10 cores in its graphics processing unit, or GPU.
- Another has 10 CPU cores (four performance ones and six for efficiency) and 10 GPU cores.
Gurman says that for the base-level MacBook Pro, at least, Apple may not use that nine-core CPU configuration and instead only produce versions with 10-core units. Plus, there is good news on the RAM end of things, as Gurman claims that for the first time, Apple will also likely start shipping at least some low-end Macs that are equipped with 16 gigabytes of memory at minimum. Even though Apple Intelligence, coming on Monday in the public release of macOS Sequoia 15.1, only requires 8 gigabytes, but performs much better with more memory.
The Mac mini will also be getting a makeover, getting a smaller package, making it more the size of an Apple TV set-top box. The new mini will include two ports on the front (like the Mac Studio) and, at least on some models, another three on the back. The new Mac mini will mark the first update to the product since the January 2023 refresh.
As for the iMac, the new model will boast an M4, represent a bit of a strategy shift. After launching the M1 version of the iMac in spring 2021, Apple didn’t update the machine again until late 2023 — when it offered the M3 processor. Now the machine is being refreshed again just 12 months later.
