Apple’s first M3 MacBooks will be released in 2024

While expected Apple’s first MacBook M3 To be announced this month, newer reports suggest that we’ll have to wait until next year for these MacBooks. This is reflected by a new supply chain report that says Apple plans to migrate to 3nm chips in 2024.

When will we see the first M3 MacBooks?

Bloomberg reported in July that we can expect the first M3 Macs to hit the market in October, with “possible” models including the iMac, 13-inch MacBook Air, and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

The news of the introduction of Apple’s first MacBook M3 shortly after the introduction of the latest M2 models, i.e. 15-inch MacBook Air and Studio M2 Ultra Mac, raised surprises. Everyone thought that Apple would migrate from M2 to M3 so quickly?

That all changed the following month, when the same source hinted at the possibility of an October M3 Mac mini, without mentioning the MacBook. Back in September, Ming-Chi Kuo was confident that we wouldn’t see any MacBook M3s until 2024.

A new report by Digitimes aimed at predicting laptop sales for the next five years suggests that global sales will grow by 4.7% next year, citing the introduction of the M3 MacBooks as one of the reasons.

In 2023, the share of notebooks built using Arm-based processors is likely to decrease rather than increase. Because Apple, which uses in-house Arm-based processors for many of its notebook laptops, is expected to see a significant drop in shipments in 2023. The US brand vendor, on the other hand, plans to switch to processors made by a 3nm node at TSMC in 2024 to boost performance. The 3nm process is what Apple uses for its M3 chips.

If you’re looking to buy a new MacBook Pro, you might want to wait for the M3 models. The migration from the 5nm process to the 3nm process provides a significant increase in power and efficiency.

Bloomberg reported that the base configuration of the M3 Pro chip will have 12 CPU cores and 18 GPU cores with up to 36GB of RAM. This means that the base M3 Pro chip has 2 more CPU cores and 2 more GPU cores compared to the base M2 Pro chip. The base model of the M3 Pro will also apparently have a slightly higher RAM ceiling to support 36 GB compared to the 32 GB in the M2 Pro chip.

The M3 chip is expected to offer improvements in power efficiency over the current 5nm-based M2 chip, due in June 2022. It is also said to have a new GPU with hardware ray tracing, which is also seen in the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro chip.