Although the Apple M3 MacBook Pro was launched only a few months ago, it seems that the company has now begun "formal development" on the M4 MacBook Pro according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
While the article didn't revolve around MacBook news, it was a little tidbit that the reporter had slipped out during a Q&A around Apple's "failed car effort," which the company had spent $10 billion on.
During the Q&A, Gurman was asked about his first Apple product, which was a blue iPod Mini. He then said he currently uses an M1 Max MacBook before claiming he might "snap up" the M4 MacBook Pro, which "just started formal development." Best of all, we have reason to think it could launch in 2024.
Will the M4 MacBook Pro launch in 2024?
While we don't have official dates, we can follow prior releases to track a speculated time of arrival. The original M1 MacBook Pro launched in November 2020, and its successor in June 2022. Apple returned to November in 2023 for the M3 MacBook Pro, meaning that if the pattern maintains, we're expecting the M4 MacBook Pro anywhere from November 2024 to June 2025.
Apple uses TSMC 2nm process 3/3Source: https://t.co/B9wdDStcCf pic.twitter.com/r8LIIW7nz7February 28, 2024
Beyond mere speculation, MacRumors reported that Korean website gamma0burst shared information that said a 2nm chip is in progress at Apple and expected in the later half of 2025. However, the website believes that will likely be reserved for the M5, as there has been a "year-and-a-half gap" between each chip launch. This means the M4 will likely remain as 3nm.
Otherwise, we're in the dark on the M4 MacBook Pro. Considering it's only been a few months since its predecessor launched, we're not expecting official news in any capacity for quite some time.
How strong will the M4 MacBook Pro be?
While Gurman provided no further information on the Apple M4 MacBook Pro outside of its "formal" existence, we can make some speculation. In our Geekbench 6 performance metric, the M3 MacBook Pro hit a multi-core score of 11,870, whereas the M2 MacBook Pro achieved a Geekbench 5.4 multi-core score of 8,911. The original M1 MacBook Pro achieved a multi-core score of 5,882 on the Geekbench 5.0 test.
While these versions aren't directly comparable, the performance gap speaks for itself. The trend here is pretty clear, so we're expecting the M4 MacBook Pro to manage around a 3,000 increase when compared to the M3, hitting nearly 15,000. We're also expecting Apple to go even further on the capabilities of AI, so it's likely that the M4 will continue to improve its neural capabilities.
