Apple discontinued its M2 chip due to poor MacBook sales

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Since 2022, the whole consumer electronics market has been poor due to the combined effects of the global economic slump and the semiconductor industry’s cold winter. At the moment, many brands are currently facing an issue. Inventory will be closely regulated by firms with good supply chain management capacity.  The most recent reports state that due to what appears to be a decline in demand for MacBooks, Apple has temporarily halted the production of the M2 series for two months. During WWDC2022, the Apple M2 chip was first unveiled, starting with the new 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models.

The memory bandwidth has increased from 68GB/s to 100GB/s, and the number of M2 transistors has gone from the initial 16 billion to 20 billion. It is built using the 5nm tech from TSMC. The M2 continues to use the same amount of energy as the M1. Despite having 4 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores, the M2’s performance has grown by 18% year over year. The neural network used by M2 has a 16-core neural engine that can process up to 15.8 trillion operations per second. This is 40% faster than the neural engine used by M1. Moreover, M2’s memory speed is up to 100GB/s, which is 50% faster than M1’s memory performance.

Multiple simultaneous projects affected the M2 Chip

Moreover, M2 supports up to 24GB of memory, giving users a more refined multitasking and working environment. This chip allows ProRes decoding on the MacBook. Without an agent, video editors can edit up to 11 4K videos simultaneously without stuttering. They can also edit up to 11  4K video streams and two 8K video streams. This greatly enhances productivity. The changes in M2’s daily usage experience are not readily evident, although this is not a problem particular to the M series. From the point of specs, M2 is merely a standard update compared to M1.

There are claims that Apple’s attempt to develop both the A-series chips, the M-series chips as well as its own baseband makes it difficult for its internal staff to cope. This also prevents the A16 chip from outperforming the A15 chip. Apple needs to carefully examine the internal issues now that this issue has surfaced in the M series semiconductors. The company is simultaneously working on a variety of hardware, including its own 5G baseband chips and Wi-Fi chips, which on the one hand have an impact on other product lines. Hence, while having the newest CPUs, the new MacBook series still fails to pique people’s appetites for consumption.

MacBook appears weak

However, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro and the 13-inch MacBook Air with the M2 CPU have also been watered down to varying degrees in other areas.  The 256G SSD version of the new 13-inch MacBook Pro was cut by one NAND flash memory chip. On the original M1 chip, the company had two NAND flash memory chips, each 128G. Yet the M2 only has a single 128G NAND flash memory chip. As a result, the M2 version SSD’s reading speed is 50% slower than the M1 version. And as a result, the problem of an insufficient product also arose with the later MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch models. These notebooks both come with the M2 Max and M2 Pro CPUs.

The Apple MacBook series appears to be in a weak market phase right now. Right now, the M2 discontinuation is also a hopeless choice. Consumers’ expectations for the M2 chip were elevated by the incredible technology of the M1 chip. However, several users have been disappointed by the M2’s comparatively subpar performance. Apple can only hope for the M3 processor if it wants to recapture the grandeur of the M1 era.