Apple’s gonna make Macs way better every year (maybe)

Your Mac’s gonna run better every year, now it’s M-powered

Can you remember the days when Mac processors lagged the industry and everyone complained they hardly ever got updated? Well, it looks like things have changed, and the new Mac moan’s going to be about how the chip gets an upgrade every year.

How can Mac users keep up?

Apple’s migration to M-series chips is generating serious praise. The processors deliver really impressive performance, seem really reliable and really use less power. They’re a real step forward.

Of course, M-series SoC processors are related to the A-series chips you’ll find inside iPhones and – well, we all know it’s now an M inside the iPad Pro.

Apple updates its mobile chips every year.

And now it looks as if speculation that the company intends updating its Mac processors almost as frequently as it does iPhones is coming to life.

That’s a real change. It probably means the iMac you buy in 2023 will be XYZ% faster than the one you buy today, which is already significantly faster than the one you could buy next week.

What’s to come

Bloomberg claims Apple plans to release several new Macs with new designs and “improved connectivity” (MagSafe, more ports including HDMI and SD card), including new models of the Mac mini and MacBook Air, along with the Mac Pro, iMac and MacBook Pro. These new Macs are expected to begin to ship in summer, starting with a redesigned MacBook Pro.

[Also read: Is it finally time for Apple’s M1 Cube?]

“The company is also working on a higher-end Mac mini desktop and larger iMac. The machines will feature processors designed in-house that will greatly outpace the performance and capabilities of the current M1 chips,” claims the report.

What does this mean? It means Apple’s Macs seem set to achieve annual upgrades, which means they will become faster each year.

And yes, that means Mac users will be uncertain when the right time to invest in a new machine might be. But it also means we can probably expect our systems will continue to maintain the same lengthy lifecycle Macs have always enjoyed, which means the fast Mac mini I’m writing this on now will likely still run the latest apps and OS’s comfortably in 2025 and beyond.

M series the next generation

Faster, faster, faster

The new processors are living up to expectation. “For the new MacBook Pros, Apple is planning two different chips, codenamed Jade C-Chop and Jade C-Die: both include eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores for a total of 10, but will be offered in either 16 or 32 graphics core variations.”

They’ll also offer 64GB memory in contrast to 16GB on M1 machines. And we’ll see something similar in the Mac Pro next year, which will offer processors either twice or fout times as powerful as the high-end MacBook Pro Apple is preparing to ship.

Here’s a quick timeline as Bloomberg describes it:

• Early 2022: New 14” and 16” MacBook Air with next-gen M1 chip. (Faster with more grpahics cores).
• Summer 2021: New MacBook Pros with 16- or 32- core grphics
• Early 2022: New MacBook Pro as above.
• 2022: Mac Pro: 20 or 40 cores, 16- or 32- high performance cores and 4 or 8 high efficiency cores.
• Mac mini: With new chip and four ports.

So, that’s the news, but in essence it suggests Macs will get better every year in future. I wonder if the Mac Upgrade Programme comes next?

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