APPLE SILICON

All I Want For Christmas is an M2 Mac

Too much is never enough

Poor Tim Cook. Apple released the new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini in November, three of the most revolutionary Macs since the first Intel Macs in 2006, and less than a month later fans and followers are already looking for the encore.

“The introduction of three new Macs featuring Apple’s breakthrough M1 chip represents a bold change that was years in the making, and marks a truly historic day for the Mac and for Apple,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “M1 is by far the most powerful chip we’ve ever created, and combined with Big Sur, delivers mind-blowing performance, extraordinary battery life, and access to more software and apps than ever before. We can’t wait for our customers to experience this new generation of Mac, and we have no doubt it will help them continue to change the world.”

As amazing as these M1-powered Macs are, the interest in what’s next is actually more than understandable. While the M1 SoC rewrites the rules for what’s possible in a personal computer, there are still some key limitations in this first iteration of Apple’s silicon for the Mac. The M1 tops out at 8 cores (4 efficiency cores, 4 performance cores) and 16GB of RAM, while the Macs that have yet to be updated have these maximum configurations:

• 16-inch MacBook Pro: 8 cores/64GB
• iMac: 10 cores/128GB
• iMac Pro : 18 cores/256GB
• Mac Pro: 28 Cores/1.5TB

In addition to the higher core counts and RAM configurations, the discrete graphics cards available on these Intel-based Macs also exceed the performance of the M1’s integrated GPU. As the owners of these Macs wait impatiently for Apple silicon to come to their models, of course, they want to know what to expect from the next generation of M-Series SoC.

The Apple Silicon Rumor Mill

Fortunately, there’s a keen market for information on Apple’s upcoming products, with Apple silicon being no exception. Reporting by Mark Gurman and Ian King at Bloomberg indicates that there will two new Mac chips next year:

Apple’s M1 chip was unveiled in a new entry-level MacBook Pro laptop, a refreshed Mac mini desktop and across the MacBook Air range. The company’s next series of chips, planned for release as early as the spring and later in the fall, are destined to be placed across upgraded versions of the MacBook Pro, both entry-level and high-end iMac desktops, and later a new Mac Pro workstation, the people said.

The road map indicates Apple’s confidence that it can differentiate its products on the strength of its own engineering and is taking decisive steps to design Intel components out of its devices. The next two lines of Apple chips are also planned to be more ambitious than some industry watchers expected for next year. The company said it expects to finish the transition away from Intel and to its own silicon in 2022.

According to Tom’s Guide (referencing a tweet from @LeaksApplePro), the next M-Series chip (the one Bloomberg says will be released in the spring) will be the M1X with 12 cores (4 efficiency cores, 8 performance cores). Further, they report that this chip will first be used in the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Learning From Our Mistakes

Tom’s Guide’s report seems to be making the same mistake as the rumors leading up to Apple’s November special event. The pre-event focus was on just the 13-inch MacBook Pro, with the possibility of other MacBook models to follow. No mention was made of a potential Mac mini update.

Now that we’ve seen Apple’s initial announcement we need to rethink their potential roadmap. To do so it might be helpful to review the multi-core performance for the Mac lineup prior to the November product release:

There were seven Mac models, each delivering a different level of CPU performance. And those multi-core scores are for the high-end configurations for each model. There were actually twenty-five different Intel CPU options available across the pre-M1 product line. While Intel benefits greatly from supplying numerous point products to its customers, this approach doesn’t hold the same benefit for Apple.

And now that Apple has deployed the M1 design across three Mac models, why would anyone think the next M-Series chip will be a point product targeted at only one of the four remaining Intel-only Macs? While Apple no longer lives by their simplified four-quadrant product grid, it seems highly unlikely that there will be four additional variants of M-Series chips. Creating two new variants of the M1 design seems more plausible:

• M1 (low-performance): MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini
• M1R (medium-performance): 16-inch MacBook Pro, and iMac
• M1S (high-performance): iMac Pro and Mac Pro

This would mean we should expect both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the iMac to be updated this spring, followed by iMac Pro and Mac Pro updates in the fall. Assuming Apple can’t deliver these Macs with RAM configurations that meet or exceed the Intel versions, the previous models will likely remain available just as they are for the low-end Macs.

This rollout approach would allow Apple to ship their silicon across its entire Mac line well in advance of its self-imposed 2-year deadline, leaving them up to a year to deliver an M2 chip that can resolve the M1’s RAM limitations. With that task completed, Apple will finally be able to expunge Intel CPUs from their product line.

Delivering two more M1 designs, followed quickly by M2 versions for all three M1 variants, seems like a very tall order, especially given the rate of Mac updates over the past decade. But given that Intel’s inability to reliably supply CPUs has been a significant gating factor, now that Apple has removed them from the product development equation, anything, it seems, is possible.