Apple's 'M2' Next-Gen Mac Chip Enters Mass Production, Expected to Debut in Redesigned MacBooks Later This Year

Oh great

-sent from my M1 machine

M2 is what we want in the 27” iMac replacement and 16” MacBook Pro laptops.

This is super early! Btw, I don’t believe it’s a M2, it’s just like a M1X for the MBP 16”, 14” and maybe iMac pro. Maybe 12 cores? This chip must support more than 16gb of ram and more than one 6k monitor.

This is great news. I can’t wait to order brand new MacBook Pro 💻

The beast is about to get unleashed…

Extremetech had an interesting article, about how Apple uses ONE chip for everything, from the cheapest MacMini to a rather expensive iMac. And what that means for Intel, which makes money by providing many, many different chips, and PC makers who differentiate by using different chips.

With that in mind, I started thinking that maybe releasing a chip with 8 performance cores now, then another one with 12 or 16 cores later, may not really make sense. If Apple goes straight from 4+4 cores to 12+4 cores, with doubled GPU cores, and the on-chip memory just as a giant cache with more external RAM, that would be very interesting. An M2 chip would then be equivalent to 18 Intel cores. So you would have the choice between either an M1 chip for "low-end" Macs that works just fine (and better than quad core Intel chips), or an M2 which blows every Intel chip out of the water, except for the most expensive Mac Pros. And nothing in between. So nothing for people who say "I want something a bit faster". Either "M1 is just fine for me" or "I really want all the performance that I can get".

(12+4 cores and not 12+12 because more than 4 power savings cores don't make sense to me. The amount of on-chip RAM would be interesting; if you have 64GB outside the chip, the choice between 8GB or 16GB on chip would be only for performance because there is little difference between a total 72GB or a total 80GB, and 8GB might give you most of the performance gains).

Apple will probably carry on selling M1 Macs as 'Entry level', M2 will possibly be for the new MacBook Pro's and iMac Pro? Perhaps there will be no M1X at all?

The M1 Macs _are_ "entry level". They are just astonishingly fast "entry level" computers, which confuses many people. Now the existing machines all make sense. I'd think that every line except maybe the MBA will gain an M2-based model. What I would find interesting is whether Apple would build the 27" iMac (probably upgraded to 30") with an M1 at all, or only with the more powerful M2.

So: MacMini - choice of M1 or M2. MBA - only M1, because it is only entry level. MBP - M1 or M2. iMac 24" ??? iMac 27/30" ???

And of course nobody knows what Apple will call the chips. They could call them all M1. And next year's chips, whether 4 or 8 or 12 cores would be M2, and M3 the year after that and M10 in 2030.

I hope the bigger imac will have more ports. I mean a desktop shouldn't have to compromise on ports. sd card atleast?