When it comes to processor design, Apple is pulling ahead

Apple’s silicon design engineers know what we’ll be using in three years time, probably..

Apple’s processor development is now so far advanced the company can choose when it wants to introduce new iterations of the chips it has.

The Apple in the Mac eye

That’s the biggest take away from this weekend’s speculation that launch of a 30-inch M-powered iMac model has been delayed into next year because Apple doesn’t want the M2 chip it will contain to dampen enthusiasm for the M1X Macs it plans introducing next.

I may be reading too much into this, but to me this basically tells me that the M1X Macs are going to deliver improvements in contrast to the current M1s, but it also tells me that the M2 processors (about which we know next to nothing) will deliver an even greater performance leap.

That Apple can plan its product road map around this knowledge surely shows how advanced its processor development plans have already become.

A new Mac every year

That’s not such a huge surprise, Apple being Apple always had ideas on how it would progress processor development, but the fact it has reached this point bodes very well for the M3, M4 and M5 chips it likely already has planned.

It also shows that Apple is confident that it can deliver new Macs on a more or less annual processor upgrade path and still continue to deliver chips that lead the industry, delight customers, and help people get stuff done.

Apple introduced its first M1 iMac in April.

I’ve used one of these machines and they are, quite simply, brilliant – as you’d expect given that every M1 Mac I’ve used has been hugely impressive. You can pretty much throw anything you like at them and they positively purr.

That’s about to get even better with the M1X MacBook Pro models Apple now plans for later in the year, when it will introduce 14- and 16-inch models of the same and upgrades to the MacBook Air and Mac mini.

However, Apple has chosen to delay the M2 Macs into 2022, apparently so they don’t distract us from the M1X models. And leaked benchmarks suggest the performance on both processors will be hugely impressive.

What’s coming with new Macs?

Along with M1X chips, these new MacBook Pros are expected to deliver:

• 17 hours battery life
• 6-speaker audio
• 1,080 FaceTime camera
• SD, 3xUSB-C, MagSafe, HDMI.

Which makes sense.

This is a fake image featuring an M1 chip

Though there is one more thing: What if the M2 chip will also be the processor pumped inside the highest end Mac Pro product?

If that’s the case then Apple will have made good its promise to upgrade all of its things within two-years of WWDC 2020, and would give the company an instant rock star focus for WWDC 2022. That’s assuming all the other devices it intends introducing and the potential possibility that the event may be the first dev conference for two years which people attend in the flesh don’t generate a huge deal of interest on their own merits.

And the best is planned for

Now, the thing about this speculation is that it really seems a snug fit with what we had anticipated early on in the Apple Silicon transition, when we’d anticipated entry level Macs running one processor, pro notebooks running an enhanced version of that chip and high-end desktops running an even better model. That’s even as we approach the inevitable move to 3nm Mac chips. As it moves to put 3nm in mobile devices starting in or after 2022, Apple has ordered 100 million A15 Bionic chips for its next generation iOS devices this year.

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