Hardware was noticeably absent at this year’s WWDC, but that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t about to release new Macs. According to display analyst Ross Young, there are strong indications that M4 MacBook Pro models will be released in Q4 in addition to the new Mac Minis. Here’s what we know.
WWDC 2024 was all about artificial intelligence – in disguise
Compared to Google, Meta and Microsoft, Apple seems to have been caught off guard by the rise of AI in recent years. While the company sometimes just waited for trends and then introduced features with their own spin, it seems that the tidal wave that is generative AI has completely blindsided them.
So expectations were sky high for WWDC 2024. Apple introduced iOS 18, macOS 16 (dubbed Sequoia) and operating system updates for the Apple Watch, iPads and their VR production Apple Vision Pro. To the surprise of many analysts, Apple rarely mentioned AI, and when it did, they renamed it Apple Intelligence.
In both iOS 18 and macOS 16, Apple Intelligence will bring features like text summaries, auto-replies, image generation, and even text generation and research through GPT-4o, where Apple works with OpenAI. Shortly before WWDC 2024, Apple unveiled the new iPad Pro, both with an OLED display and their new CPU line, the M4. This makes it very likely that we will see M4 MacBook Pro models soon!
M4 Macbook Pro – What to Expect
After recently updating its line of professional notebooks to the latest generation Apple Silicon CPU M3, it was unlikely that Apple would introduce M4 MacBook Pro models at WWDC. But both Marc Gurman, a Bloomberg analyst and one of the most trusted sources on anything Apple leaks, and display analyst Ross Young believe the M4 MacBook Pro models will arrive this year.
While we only know about the M4 CPU in the latest iPad Pro, there is enough evidence from past generations to speculate about upcoming models. Compared to the M3, the base model M4 has nine CPU cores instead of eight CPU cores and ten GPU cores instead of eight GPU cores.
The M4 MacBook Pro models are expected to arrive in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, with the M4 and M4 Pro processors in the former and the M4 Pro and M4 Max in the latter. The M4 Pro will likely come with up to 14 CPU cores, depending on the Macbook model, while the M4 Max will likely bring up to 18 CPU cores. However, what is most interesting for music producers is the number of performance cores in each model. Additionally, the maximum amount of RAM is likely to increase to 48GB for the Pro and possibly 256GB for the M4 Max.
When will the M4 MacBook Pro models arrive?
While Gurman said a while ago that Apple will likely release the M4 MacBook Pro and Mac Mini this year, display analyst Ross Young recently issued a subscriber tweet that narrows it down to Q4. Young claims that panel shipments for both the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models are expected in early Q3 2024. Which would make a Q4 release, typically October for new Apple products, very likely!
How Apple will incorporate AI features into its novelty models remains to be seen. But more important to music producers than performance cores is whether the next version of macOS could finally be the one that doesn’t break plugins. Because in this regard, Apple’s recent record is not the best.
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