Supply chain report echoes reports of M3 MacBooks in 2024

While there was once hope of the first M3 MacBooks being launched this month, more recent reporting has suggested we’re going to have to wait until next year for these. This is echoed by a new supply chain report, which says that Apple plans to make the switch to 3nm chips in 2024.

There is still some hope that we may see some M3 Macs before then, just not laptops …

When will we see the first M3 MacBooks?

Bloomberg reported back in July that we could expect the first M3 Macs to land in October, and that “likely” models included an iMac, 13-inch MacBook Air, and 13-inch MacBook Pro (yep, an update to the old Touch Bar model).

That raised some eyebrows, ours included, as it seemed a bit soon after the introduction of the most recent M2 models – namely, the 15-inch MacBook Air and M2 Ultra Mac Studio. Would Apple really make the transition from M2 to M3 that quickly, we wondered?

Things changed by the following month, when the same source pointed to the possibility of an M3 Mac mini launching in October, but with no mention of MacBooks.

By September, Ming-Chi Kuo was confident that we wouldn’t be seeing any M3 MacBooks until 2024.

‘Digitimes’ report

A new Digitimes report aiming to forecast laptop sales for the next five years suggests that global shipments will grow by 4.7% next year, and cites the introduction of M3 MacBooks as one reason for that.

In 2023, the share of notebooks built using Arm-based processors will likely decrease rather than increase because Apple, which adopts in-house designed Arm-based CPUs for most of its notebook lineups, is expected to experience a significant decline in shipments in 2023 as the US brand vendor plans to transit to CPUs built by a 3nm node at TSMC for performance upgrading in 2024. 

The 3nm process is what Apple will use for M3 chips.

They will likely be worth the wait

If you’re planning on upgrading to a new MacBook Pro, you may well want to wait until the M3 models. The switch from a 5nm process to a 3nm one should provide a significant boost in both power and efficiency.

Bloomberg has reported the base configuration of M3 Pro chip will feature 12 CPU cores and 18 GPU cores, with a maximum of 36GB of RAM. This suggests that the base M3 Pro chip has 2 more CPU cores and 2 more GPU cores compared to the baseline M2 Pro chip. The baseline M3 Pro will also apparently have a slightly higher RAM ceiling, supporting up to 36GB vs 32GB on the M2 Pro chip.

We haven’t seen reporting on the likely capabilities of the base M3 chip, but it’s probable that the improvement over the base M2 will be of a similar order.

Photo: Tai Ngo/Unsplash

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