Apple Mac Studio, Mac Pro, MacBook Air - who will get the M4 upgrade next?
[18:34 Mon,20.January 2025 by Thomas Richter]
Apple first upgraded the iPad Pro, then the iMac, the Mac mini, and the MacBook Pro to the new M4 chip, manufactured using 3nm technology. But which model is next?
Apple&s performance flagships, the Mac Pro and Mac Studio, are overdue for an upgrade. Apple skipped the upgrade to the last generation for both, meaning they still use the M2 Max and M2 Ultra respectively. If Apple wants to keep its top models up-to-date and benefit from the advantages of more modern manufacturing methods, it would need to release an M4 Ultra this year – especially considering that benchmarks show the new M4 Pro and Max significantly outperform the old M2 Ultra in both single-core and multi-core performance.
Rumors predicted that the next generation of Mac Pros and Mac Studios would be unveiled in mid-2025 – likely at Apple&s WWDC developer conference – and launched later in the year. However, according to new rumors from Apple leaker Mark Gurman, this might happen even sooner, within the first half of 2025. The reason is that Apple wants to introduce Macs with the new M5 chip in the fall/winter – to avoid these new models taking potential buyers away from the new Mac Pro and Studio, hence the earlier release.
If Apple wants to scale performance similarly to previous models, the Mac Studio will be equipped with the M4 Max, already integrated into the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro – and even more powerful versions of the Mac Studio and Mac Pro with an M4 Ultra chip, which has not yet been used.
Mac Studio / Mac Pro with M4 Ultra
Similar to the M2 Ultra, the M4 Ultra would consist of two M4 Max chips connected via UltraFusion, with double the number of CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine cores, as well as memory. This means – based on the currently best M4 Max in the MacBook Pro – there would be an M4 Ultra chip with 32 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, 32 Neural Engine cores, and 256 GB of RAM. If performance scales similarly to the M2 Max vs. M2 Ultra, the M4 Ultra should offer approximately 45% higher performance than the corresponding M4 Max model.
No M4 Extreme
Rumors of an M3 Extreme, a combination of four M3 Max chips, have not materialized or have been abandoned by Apple. Therefore, such a model is no longer expected – although there would likely be demand given the enormous power hunger of modern multimodal AIs. However, Mac Minis are already being networked via Thunderbolt 5 to run large LLMs, such as DeepSeek-V3 on an AI cluster of eight Mac Minis with M4 Pro and 64GB each:
Mac Mini 4 AI Cluster
MacBook Air
Before the new top models, the MacBook Air is expected to receive an upgrade to the M4 chip – not in March as last year, as in March, but already in January or February. According to Mark Gurman, the MacBook Air is already in production. In addition to the CPU/GPU upgrade, the new models could also include three Thunderbolt 4 ports (instead of two Thunderbolt 3 ports) and the ability to drive two external monitors in addition to the built-in display.
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