Working at the intersection of Apple’s newest hardware and Linux kernel development, for the benefit of a free distribution, was never going to be easy. But it’s been an especially hard couple of weeks for Hector Martin, project lead for Asahi Linux, capping off years of what he describes as burnout, user entitlement, and political battles within the Linux kernel community about Rust code.
In a post on his site, “Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead,” Martin summarizes his history with hardware hacking projects, including his time with the Wii homebrew scene (Team Twiizers/fail0verflow), which had its share of insistent users desperate to play pirated games. Martin shifted his focus, and when Apple unveiled its own silicon with the M1 series, Martin writes, “I realized that making it run Linux was my dream project.” This time, there was no jailbreaking and a relatively open, if tricky, platform.
Support and donations came quickly. The first two years saw rapid advancement of a platform built “from scratch, with zero vendor support or documentation.” Upstreaming code to the Linux kernel, across “practically every Linux subsystem,” was an “incredibly frustrating experience” (emphasis Martin’s).
Then came the users demanding to know when Thunderbolt, monitors over USB-C, M3/M4 support, and even CPU temperature checking would appear. Donations and pledges slowly decreased while demands increased. “It seemed the more things we accomplished, the less support we had,” Martin writes.
Martin cites personal complications, along with stalking and harassment, as slowing down work through 2024, while Vulkan drivers and an emulation stack still shipped. Simultaneously, issues with pushing Rust code into the Linux kernel were brewing. Rust was “the entire reason our GPU driver was able to succeed in the time it did,” Martin writes. Citing the Nova driver for Nvidia GPUs as an example, Martin writes that “More modern programming languages are better suited to writing drivers for more modern hardware with more complexity and novel challenges, unsurprisingly.”
One of the key differences between Apple’s Macs and the iPhone and iPad is that the Mac can still boot and run non-Apple operating systems. This is a feature that Apple specifically built for the Mac, one of many features meant to ease the transition from Intel’s chips to Apple’s own silicon.
The problem, at least at first, was that alternate operating systems like Windows and Linux didn’t work natively with Apple’s hardware, not least because of missing drivers for basic things like USB ports, GPUs, and power management. Enter the Asahi Linux project, a community-driven effort to make open-source software run on Apple’s hardware.
In just a few years, the team has taken Linux on Apple Silicon from “basically bootable” to “plays native Windows games and sounds great doing it.” And the team’s ultimate goal is to contribute enough code upstream that you no longer need a Linux distribution just for Apple Silicon Macs.
On December 4 at 3: 30 pm Eastern (1: 30 pm Pacific), Ars Technica Senior Technology Reporter Andrew Cunningham will host a livestreamed YouTube conversation with Asahi Linux Project Lead Hector Martin and Graphics Lead Alyssa Rosenzweig that will cover the project’s genesis and its progress, as well as what the future holds.
Not a surprising generational update, but a lot of progress for just one year.
The new M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
The new M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
In some ways, my review of the new MacBook Pros will be a lot like my review of the new iMac. This is the third year and fourth generation of the Apple Silicon-era MacBook Pro design, and outwardly, few things have changed about the new M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max laptops.
Here are the things that are different. Boosted RAM capacities, across the entire lineup but most crucially in the entry-level $1,599 M4 MacBook Pro, make the new laptops a shade cheaper and more versatile than they used to be. The new nano-texture display option, a $150 upgrade on all models, is a lovely matte-textured coating that completely eliminates reflections. There’s a third Thunderbolt port on the baseline M4 model (the M3 model had two), and it can drive up to three displays simultaneously (two external, plus the built-in screen). There’s a new webcam. It looks a little nicer and has a wide-angle lens that can show what’s on your desk instead of your face if you want it to. And there are new chips, which we’ll get to.
That is essentially the end of the list. If you are still using an Intel-era MacBook Pro, I’ll point you to our previous reviews, which mostly celebrate the improvements (more and different kids of ports, larger screens) while picking one or two nits (they are a bit larger and heavier than late-Intel MacBook Pros, and the display notch is an eyesore).
New chips: M4 and M4 Pro
That leaves us with the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max.
We’ve already talked a bunch about the M4 and M4 Pro in our reviews of the new iMac and the new Mac minis, but to recap, the M4 is a solid generational upgrade over the M3, thanks to its two extra efficiency cores on the CPU side. Comparatively, the M4 Pro is a much larger leap over the M3 Pro, mostly because the M3 Pro was such a mild update compared to the M2 Pro.
The M4’s single-core performance is between 14 and 21 percent faster than the M3s in our tests, and tests that use all the CPU cores are usually 20 or 30 percent faster. The GPU is occasionally as much as 33 percent faster than the M3 in our tests, though more often, the improvements are in the single or low double digits.
For the M4 Pro—bearing in mind that we tested the fully enabled version with 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, and not the slightly cut down version sold in less expensive machines—single-core CPU performance is up by around 20-ish percent in our tests, in line with the regular M4’s performance advantage over the regular M3. The huge boost to CPU core count increases multicore performance by between 50 and 60 percent most of the time, a substantial boost that actually allows the M4 Pro to approach the CPU performance of the 2022 M1 Ultra. GPU performance is up by around 33 percent compared to M3 Pro, thanks to the additional GPU cores and memory bandwidth, but it’s still not as fast as any of Apple’s Max or Ultra chips, even the M1-series.
M4 Max
And finally, there’s the M4 Max (again, the fully enabled version, this one with 12 P-cores, 4 E-cores, 40 GPU cores, and 546GB/s of memory bandwidth). Single-core CPU performance is the biggest leap forward, jumping by between 18 and 28 percent in single-threaded benchmarks. Multi-core performance is generally up by between 15 and 20 percent. That’s a more-than-respectable generational leap, but it’s nowhere near what happened for the M4 Pro since both M3 Mac and M4 Max have the same CPU core counts.
The only weird thing we noticed in our testing was an inconsistent performance in our Handbrake video encoding test. Every time we ran it, it reliably took either five minutes and 20 seconds or four minutes and 30 seconds. For the slower result, power usage was also slightly reduced, which suggests to me that some kind of throttling is happening during this workload; we saw roughly these two results over and over across a dozen or so runs, each separated by at least five minutes to allow the Mac to cool back down. High Power mode didn’t make a difference in either direction.
CPU P/E-cores
GPU cores
RAM options
Display support (including internal)
Memory bandwidth
Apple M4 Max (low)
10/4
32
36GB
Up to five
410GB/s
Apple M4 Max (high)
12/4
40
48/64/128GB
Up to five
546GB/s
Apple M3 Max (high)
12/4
40
48/64/128GB
Up to five
409.6GB/s
Apple M2 Max (high)
8/4
38
64/96GB
Up to five
409.6GB/s
We shared our data with Apple and haven’t received a response. Note that we tested the M4 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and we’d expect any kind of throttling behavior to be slightly more noticeable in the 14-inch Pro since it has less room for cooling hardware.
The faster result is more in line with the rest of our multi-core tests for the M4 Max. Even the slower of the two results is faster than the M3 Max, albeit not by much. We also didn’t notice similar behavior for any of the other multi-core tests we ran. It’s worth keeping in mind if you plan to use the MacBook Pro for CPU-heavy, sustained workloads that will run for more than a few minutes at a time.
GPU performance in our tests varies widely compared to the M4 Max, with results ranging from as little as 10 or 15 percent (for 4K and 1440p GFXBench tests—the bigger boost to the 1080p version is coming partially from CPU improvements) to as high as 30 percent for the Cinebench 2024 GPU test. I suspect the benefits will vary depending on how much the apps you’re running benefit from the M4 Max’s improved memory bandwidth.
Power efficiency in the M4 Max isn’t dramatically different from the M3 Max—it’s more efficient by virtue of using roughly the same amount of power as the M3 Max and running a little faster, consuming less energy overall to do the same amount of work.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Finally, in a test of High Power mode, we did see some very small differences in the GFXBench scores, though not in other GPU-based tests like Cinebench and Blender or in any CPU-based tests. You might notice slightly better performance in games if you’re running them, but as with the M4 Pro, it doesn’t seem hugely beneficial. This is different from how it’s handled in many Windows PCs, including Snapdragon X Elite PCs with Arm-based chips in them because they do have substantially different performance in high-performance mode relative to the default “balanced” mode.
Nice to see you, yearly upgrade
The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. The nano-texture glass displays eliminate all of the normal glossy-screen reflections and glare. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
The new MacBook Pros are all solid year-over-year upgrades, though they’ll be most interesting to people who bought their last MacBook Pro toward the end of the Intel era sometime in 2019 or 2020. The nano-texture display, extra speed, and extra RAM may be worth a look for owners of the M1 MacBook Pros if you truly need the best performance you can get in a laptop. But I’d still draw a pretty bright line between latter-day Intel Macs (aging, hot, getting toward the end of the line for macOS updates, not getting all the features of current macOS versions anyway) and any kind of Apple Silicon Mac (fully supported with all features, still-current designs, barely three years old at most).
Frankly, the computer that benefits the most is probably the $1,599 entry-level MacBook Pro, which, thanks to the 16GB RAM upgrade and improved multi-monitor support, is a fairly capable professional computer. Of all the places where Apple’s previous 8GB RAM floor felt inappropriate, it was in the M3 MacBook Pro. With the extra ports, high-refresh-rate screen, and nano-texture coating option, it’s a bit easier to articulate the kind of user who that laptop is actually for, separating it a bit from the 15-inch MacBook Air.
The M4 Pro version also deserves a shout-out for its particularly big performance jump compared to the M2 Pro and M3 Pro generations. It’s a little odd to have a MacBook Pro generation where the middle chip is the most impressive of the three, and that’s not to discount how fast the M4 Max is—it’s just the reality of the situation given Apple’s focus on efficiency rather than performance for the M3 Pro.
The good
RAM upgrades across the whole lineup. This particularly benefits the $1,599 M4 MacBook Air, which jumps from 8GB to 16GB
M4 and M4 Max are both respectable generational upgrades and offer substantial performance boosts from Intel or even M1 Macs
M4 Pro is a huge generational leap, as Apple’s M3 Pro used a more conservative design
Nano-texture display coating is very nice and not too expensive relative to the price of the laptops
Better multi-monitor support for M4 version
Other design things—ports, 120 Hz screen, keyboard, and trackpad—are all mostly the same as before and are all very nice
The bad
Occasional evidence of M4 Max performance throttling, though it’s inconsistent, and we only saw it in one of our benchmarks
Need to jump all the way to M4 Max to get the best GPU performance
The ugly
Expensive, especially once you start considering RAM and storage upgrades
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
The M4 Max is also the only chip where memory bandwidth and RAM support changes between the low- and high-end versions. The low-end M4 Max offers 410GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the fully enabled M4 Max offers 546GB/s.
For completeness’ sake, there is a third version of the M4 that Apple ships, with nine CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and 8GB of RAM. But the company is only shipping that version of the chip in M4 iPad Pros with 256GB or 512GB of storage, so we haven’t included it in the tables here.
Compared to the M2 and M3
CPU P/E-cores
GPU cores
RAM options
Display support (including internal)
Memory bandwidth
Apple M4 (low)
4/4
8
16/24GB
Up to two
120GB/s
Apple M4 (high)
4/6
10
16/24/32GB
Up to three
120GB/s
Apple M3 (high)
4/4
16
8/16/24GB
Up to two
102.4GB/s
Apple M2 (high)
4/4
10
8/16/24GB
Up to two
102.4GB/s
One interesting thing about the M4: This is the first time that the low-end Apple Silicon CPU has increased its maximum core count. The M1, M2, and M3 all used a 4+4 split that divided evenly between performance and efficiency cores, but the M4 can include six efficiency cores instead.
That’s not a game-changing development performance-wise (the “E” in “E-core” does not stand for “exciting”), but we’ve seen over and over again in chips from Apple, Intel, and others that adding more efficiency cores does meaningfully improve CPU performance in heavily multithreaded tasks.
CPU P/E-cores
GPU cores
RAM options
Display support (including internal)
Memory bandwidth
Apple M4 Pro (low)
8/4
16
24/48/64GB
Up to three
273GB/s
Apple M4 Pro (high)
10/4
20
24/48/64GB
Up to three
273GB/s
Apple M3 Pro (high)
6/6
18
18/36GB
Up to three
153.6GB/s
Apple M2 Pro (high)
8/4
19
16/32GB
Up to three
204.8GB/s
The M4 Pro is the most interesting year-over-year upgrade, though this says more about the M3 Pro than anything else. As we noted last year, it was a bit of an outlier, the only one of the M3-generation chips with fewer transistors than its predecessor. A small decrease in GPU cores and a large decrease in high-performance CPU cores explains most of the difference. The result was a very power-efficient chip, but also one that was more of a sidestep from the M2 Pro than a real upgrade.
Apple’s week of Mac announcements continues today, and as expected, we’re getting a substantial new update to the Mac mini. Apple’s least-expensive Mac, the mini, is being updated with new M4 processors, plus a smaller design that looks like a cross between an Apple TV box and a Mac Studio—this is the mini’s first major design change since the original aluminum version was released in 2010. The mini is also Apple’s first device to ship with the M4 Pro processor, a beefed-up version of the M4 with more CPU and GPU cores, and it’s also the Mac mini’s first update since the M2 models came out in early 2023.
The cheapest Mac mini will still run you $599, which includes 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage; as with yesterday’s iMac update, this is the first time since 2012 that Apple has boosted the amount of RAM in an entry-level Mac. It’s a welcome upgrade for every new Mac in the lineup that’s getting it, but the $200 that Apple previously charged for the 16GB upgrade makes an even bigger difference to someone shopping for a $599 system than it does for someone who can afford a $999 or $1,299 computer.
The M4 Pro Mac mini starts at $1,399, a $100 increase from the M2 Pro version. Both models go up for preorder today and will begin arriving on November 8.
A brand-new design for a little box
The new Mac mini is larger than the Apple TV by a bit—5×5 inches instead of 3.66×3.66 inches—but its proportions are roughly similar. That makes its footprint significantly smaller than the old mini (and the current Studio), which was 7.75×7.75 inches. But it’s also a fair bit taller: 2 inches, up from 1.4 inches.
Like the Studio, it’s made primarily of aluminum and has a pair of 10 Gbps USB-C ports on the front, plus an indicator light and a headphone jack for connecting headphones or speakers. On the back, it sheds all of its remaining USB-A ports in favor of Thunderbolt/USB-C ports (note that, like some Mac Studio models, the ports on the back have Thunderbolt capabilities and the ones on the front don’t). Compared to the old M2 mini, this is a net gain of one rear Thunderbolt port, but you’re giving one up compared to the M2 Pro Mac mini—the extra ports on the front should make up for this, but it’s worth noting if you have something connected to every single Thunderbolt port on your current box. All Mac mini models still include a gigabit Ethernet port and a full-size HDMI port, so USB-A is the only port you’ll need a dongle for that you didn’t need one for before.
Reliable rumors have suggested that M4 Macs are right around the corner, and now Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is forecasting a specific launch date: November 1, following a late-October announcement that mirrors last year’s Halloween-themed reveal for the first M3 Macs.
This date could be subject to change, and not all the products announced in October would necessarily launch on November 1—lower-end Macs are more likely to launch early, and higher-end models would be more likely to ship a bit later in the month.
The list of what to expect is the same as it has been for a while: refreshed 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips, a new M4 version of the 24-inch iMac, and an M4 update to the Mac mini that leapfrogs the M3 entirely. These will all be the first Macs to get the M4, following its unexpected introduction in the iPad Pro earlier this year.
The refreshed Mac mini is the most interesting of the new models—it’s said to come with a fully revamped design for the first time since the aluminum unibody version was released in 2010. The new Mac mini is said to be closer in size to an Apple TV box, but it will retain an internal power supply that doesn’t require a bulky external brick. The Mac mini lineup should still be split between two slightly different machines: one entry-level model with a basic M4 chip, and a higher-end M4 Pro version that bridges the gap between the Mac mini and the Mac Studio.
Enlarge/ Apple’s M3 Max-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro. New Pro laptops and some desktops could be on tap for later this fall.
Andrew Cunningham
Apple’s newest iPhones and Apple Watches don’t come out until later this week, but the rumor mill is already indicating that Apple is planning a product announcement for October to refresh some of the products that didn’t get a mention at the iPhone event. Apple scheduled its release calendar similarly last year, when it announced and released new iPhones in September and then launched the first wave of M3 Macs around Halloween.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes that the event will mainly focus on the first wave of Macs with M4 processors, following the standard M4’s introduction in the iPad Pro earlier this year. As he has reported previously, he expects new MacBook Pro models with the M4 and “pro-level M4 chip options,” presumably the M4 Pro and M4 Max. He also expects an M4 version of the 24-inch iMac.
But the most interesting of the new Macs will still be the redesigned Mac mini, which hasn’t gotten an M3 update at all and has been using the same basic external design since 2010. This Mac mini is said to be closer in size to the Apple TV than the current mini, but still uses an internal power supply so that owners won’t have to wrangle a power brick. At least some of the current device’s ports will be replaced by USB-C and/or Thunderbolt ports, something that MacRumors apparently confirmed earlier today when they found a reference to an “Apple silicon Mac mini (5 ports)” in an Apple software update (some of those ports are reportedly on the front of the device, a nice Mac Studio design upgrade that I’d like to see on a new Mac mini).
The “five port” descriptor does imply that there will be another model with either more or fewer ports—Apple used similar terminology to distinguish the two- and four-port versions of some MacBook Pro models in the Intel days. The current M2 Mac mini models have fewer ports than the models with the M2 Pro chip, because the more powerful processor also has more I/O capabilities—assuming we get one Mac mini with an M4 and an upgraded model with an M4 Pro, we’d expect the Pro version to have more ports.
Gurman says that other Mac models, including the Mac Studio, Mac Pro, and MacBook Air, will see M4-series updates throughout 2025. Of those, the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro have gone the longest without an update—they’re all still using M2-series chips.
Apple is also said to be planning some new lower-end iPads for the October event—not the first time that Macs and iPads have shared billing for one of these late-fall product announcements. The $349 iPad 10 and the iPad mini have both gone over a year without any kind of hardware update; it seems likely that they’ll both get newer chips, if not significantly updated designs.
The macOS 15 Sequoia update will inevitably be known as “the AI one” in retrospect, introducing, as it does, the first wave of “Apple Intelligence” features.
That’s funny because none of that stuff is actually ready for the 15.0 release that’s coming out today. A lot of it is coming “later this fall” in the 15.1 update, which Apple has been testing entirely separately from the 15.0 betas for weeks now. Some of it won’t be ready until after that—rumors say image generation won’t be ready until the end of the year—but in any case, none of it is ready for public consumption yet.
But the AI-free 15.0 release does give us a chance to evaluate all of the non-AI additions to macOS this year. Apple Intelligence is sucking up a lot of the media oxygen, but in most other ways, this is a typical 2020s-era macOS release, with one or two headliners, several quality-of-life tweaks, and some sparsely documented under-the-hood stuff that will subtly change how you experience the operating system.
The AI-free version of the operating system is also the one that all users of the remaining Intel Macs will be using, since all of the Apple Intelligence features require Apple Silicon. Most of the Intel Macs that ran last year’s Sonoma release will run Sequoia this year—the first time this has happened since 2019—but the difference between the same macOS version running on different CPUs will be wider than it has been. It’s a clear indicator that the Intel Mac era is drawing to a close, even if support hasn’t totally ended just yet.
For the last couple years, Apple has reserved its most significant silicon updates for its iPhone Pro models, while the less expensive non-Pro iPhones have made do with year-old chips. This year, Apple is introducing new A18-series chips for both Pro and non-Pro iPhones, chips which it says are “designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up.”
The Apple A18 (no Pro, no Bionic, just A18) will power the new iPhone 16 and 16 Plus—the iPhone 15 used an A16 Bionic, and jumping two chip generations in one year makes for more impressive-sounding performance numbers.
Like the last few generations of iPhone chip, the A18 includes a 6-core CPU with two high-performance processor cores and four high-efficiency cores. Apple says the CPU is 30 percent faster than the A16 chip in the iPhone 15. The A18 also includes a 5-core GPU that Apple says is 40 percent faster than the GPU in the iPhone 15—the A18 GPU also supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which was introduced in the A17 Pro.
Enlarge/ The A18 includes a six-core CPU with two high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores.
Apple
A 16-core neural engine will accelerate Apple Intelligence’s AI and machine learning capabilities, and 17 percent higher memory bandwidth compared to the A16 rounds out its capabilities. The chip is built using a “second-generation 3 nm” manufacturing process, most likely from longtime Apple manufacturing partner TSMC.
Apple didn’t mention RAM specifically—it rarely does, for iPhones—but the A18 likely has at least 8GB of RAM to help it run Apple Intelligence models. The A16 in the iPhone 15 included 6GB of RAM.
Apple
The iPhone 16 Pro gets a new Pro chip; the A18 Pro’s upgrades over the A18 are mostly subtle, and it’s less of an upgrade over the iPhone 15 Pro and its A17 Pro chip.
Apple is still using a six-core CPU with two high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, but Apple says that “larger caches” and “next-generation ML accelerators” will boost its performance a bit beyond the cores in the regular A18. Apple says CPU performance should be around 15 percent faster than in the A17 Pro.
The GPU in the A18 Pro uses the same architecture as the A18, but it has six GPU cores instead of five, and it is 20 percent faster than the A17 Pro’s GPU. Apple said that hardware-accelerated ray tracing could be up to twice as fast as in the A17 Pro, but the regular A18 Pro should benefit from this improvement, too. The A18 Pro has the same 16-core Neural Engine as the A18, and also benefits from 17 percent more memory bandwidth.
Enlarge/ Better video and I/O capabilities help separate the A18 Pro from the regular A18.
Apple
Some things that make the A18 Pro “pro” are related to its I/O, and its media encoding and decoding hardware. The A18 Pro supports ProRes video encoding, has a new image signal processor that apparently isn’t in the A18, and also supports “faster USB 3 speeds” than the A17 Pro. For those using their iPhones to shoot professional-grade video, these are small but welcome improvements over the A18 that will help shoot better video, and make it easier to offload video to a computer when it’s time to edit.
Apple hasn’t updated its Mac mini desktop lineup since the beginning of 2023, when it added M2 and M2 Pro chips and discontinued the last of the Intel models. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the update drought will end later this year, when the mini will skip right from the M2 to the M4, something he originally reported back in April.
But the mini will reportedly come with more than just new chips: it will also get a new, smaller design, which Gurman says will be closer in size to an Apple TV box (specifically, he says it may be a bit taller, but will have a substantially smaller footprint). The new mini could have “at least three USB-C ports,” as well as a power connector and an HDMI port.
This would be Apple’s first overhaul of the Mac mini’s design since the original aluminum unibody version was released back in June of 2010. That model did include a slot for a built-in SuperDrive DVD burner, something Apple dropped from later models as optical drives became less necessary, but the M2 Mac mini has the same basic design and the same footprint as that Core 2 Duo Mac mini introduced over a decade ago.
Intel and other PC makers have been releasing computers smaller than the Mac mini for years now, starting with Intel’s (discontinued, then handed off) NUC desktops and proliferating from there. Often, these systems would save space by including an external power brick, while the mini has always used an integrated power supply. But the Apple TV, also powered by Apple Silicon chips and also with an internal power supply, suggested that it was possible to design a physically smaller system without making that particular design compromise.
Though the design is changing, Apple’s general approach to the Mac mini is staying the same as it is now. There will be a base model with a regular Apple M4 processor in it, and an upgraded model with the yet-to-be-released M4 Pro in it to help bridge the gap between the low-end mini and the more powerful Mac Studio. If the new mini has dramatically fewer ports than current models, that would also be a point of differentiation, though hopefully it would continue to include enough USB-C ports to support multiple external monitors along with other accessories.
Gurman doesn’t know whether Apple will change the pricing of the Mac mini to go with the new design, though he does think the new mini “may be cheaper to make.”
The new Mac minis will reportedly be available later in the year, though the M4 Pro models could be announced or released later than the standard M4 models. Gurman says that new iMac and MacBook Pro models with M4-series chips could release “as early as this year,” while M4 MacBook Airs would wait for the spring of 2025, and Mac Studio and Mac Pro desktops wouldn’t be updated until “the middle of next year.”
The M4 chip was introduced in this year’s iPad Pro refresh, just a few months after the launch of the M3; this was the first time one of Apple’s M-series processors debuted in anything other than a Mac.
The new 13-inch iPad Air with the Apple M2 processor inside.
Andrew Cunningham
In portrait mode. The 13-inch model is a little large for dedicated tablet use, but if you do want a gigantic tablet, the $799 price is appealing.
Andrew Cunningham
The Apple Pencil Pro attaches, pairs, and charges via a magnetic connection on the edge of the iPad.
Andrew Cunningham
In the Magic Keyboard. This kickstand-less case is still probably the best way to make the iPad into a true laptop replacement, though it’s expensive and iPadOS is still a problem.
Andrew Cunningham
The tablet’s USB-C port, used for charging and connecting to external accessories.
Andrew Cunningham
Apple’s Smart Folio case. The magnets on the cover will scoot up and down the back of the iPad, allowing you a bit of flexibility when angling the screen.
Andrew Cunningham
The Air’s single-lens, flash-free camera, seen here peeking through the Smart Folio case.
Andrew Cunningham
The iPad Air has been a lot of things in the last decade-plus. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Airs were just The iPad, and the “Air” label simply denoted how much lighter and more streamlined they were than the initial 2010 iPad and 2011’s long-lived iPad 2. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple focused on introducing and building out the iPad Pro.
The Air disappeared for a while after that, but it returned in 2019 as an in-betweener model to bridge the gap between the $329 iPad (no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first-gen Air design) and more-expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It definitely made sense to have a hardware offering to span the gap between the basic no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could make things complicated. The main issue for the last couple of years has been the base Air’s 64GB of storage—scanty enough that memory swapping doesn’t even work on it— and the fact that stepping up to 256GB brought the Air too close to the price of the 11-inch iPad Pro.
Which brings us to the 2024 M2 iPad Air, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by bumping the Air’s base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any pricing overlap (only the 1TB 11-inch Air, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call the new Airs the “default” iPad for most buyers—the now-$349 10th-gen iPad still does everything the iPad is best at for less money, and it’s still all you really need if you just want a casual gaming, video streaming, and browsing tablet (or a tablet for a kid). But the M2 Air is the iPad that best covers the totality of everything the iPad can do from its awkward perch, stuck halfway between the form and function of the iPhone and the Mac.
Not quite a last-gen iPad Pro
The new iPad Airs have a lot in common with the M2 iPad Pro from 2022. They have the same screen sizes and resolutions, the same basic design, they work with the same older Magic Keyboard accessories (not the new ones with the function rows, metal palm rests, and larger trackpads, which are reserved for the iPad Pro), and they obviously have the same Apple M2 chip.
Performance-wise, nothing we saw in the benchmarks we ran was surprising; the M2’s CPU and (especially) its GPU are a solid generational jump up from the M1, and the M1 is already generally overkill for the vast majority of iPad apps. The M3 and M4 are both significantly faster than the M2, but the M2 is still unquestionably powerful enough to do everything people currently use iPads to do.
That said, Apple’s decision to use an older chip rather than the M3 or M4 does mean the new Airs come into the world missing some capabilities that have come to other Apple products announced in the last six months or so. That list includes hardware-accelerated ray-tracing on the GPU, hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec decoding, and, most importantly, a faster Neural Engine to help power whatever AI stuff Apple’s products pick up in this fall’s big software updates.
The 13-inch Air’s screen has the same resolution and pixel density (2732×2048, 264 PPI) as the last-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro. And unlike the 13-inch Pro, which truly is a 13-inch screen, Apple’s tech specs page says the 13-inch Air is still using a 12.9-inch screen, and Apple is just rounding up to get to 13.
The 13-inch Air display does share some other things with the last-generation iPad Pro screen, including P3 color, a 600-nit peak brightness. Its display panel has been laminated to the front glass, and it has an anti-reflective coating (two of the subtle but important quality improvements the Air has that the $349 10th-gen iPad doesn’t). But otherwise it’s not the same panel as the M2 Pro; there’s no mini LED, no HDR support, and no 120 Hz ProMotion support.
Apple says the M4 includes “up to” four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. Apple’s high-level performance estimates say that the M4 has 50 percent faster CPU performance and four times as much graphics performance. Like the GPU in the M3, the M4 also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing to enable more advanced lighting effects in games and other apps. Due partly to its “second-generation” 3 nm manufacturing process, Apple says the M4 can match the performance of the M2 while using just half the power.
As with so much else in the tech industry right now, the M4 also has an AI focus; Apple says it’s beefing up the 16-core Neural Engine (Apple’s equivalent of the Neural Processing Unit that companies like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft have been pushing lately). Apple says the M4 runs up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), considerably ahead of Intel’s Meteor Lake platform, though a bit short of the 45 TOPS that Qualcomm is promising with the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus series. The M3’s Neural Engine is only capable of 18 TOPS, so that’s a major step up for Apple’s hardware.
Apple’s chips since 2017 have included some version of the Neural Engine, though to date, those have mostly been used to enhance and categorize photos, perform optical character recognition, enable offline dictation, and do other oddities. But it may be that Apple needs something faster for the kinds of on-device large language model-backed generative AI that it’s expected to introduce in iOS and iPadOS 18 at WWDC next month.
The wait between the M1 and M2 and the wait between the M2 and M3 were each about a year and a half. With as few technical details as Apple has announced, it’s tough to know what to make of the faster turnaround between the M3 and M4. It could be that the M3 was behind schedule and the M4 was on time or ahead; it could also be that the M4 is a relatively modest architectural update to the M3. We’ll need to test the hardware ourselves to determine exactly how the M3 and M4 stack up to each other.
The fast introduction of the M4 makes it a little clearer why Apple might choose not to update devices like the Mac mini with an M3 chip. Either the M3 processor generation will be uncommonly short, or Apple plans to sell a mix of M3 and M4 devices this year.