Thursday, October 24th 2024
Apple MacBook Pro, Mac mini and 24" iMac With M4 SoC Likely To Arrive Next Week
Apple's M4 is an impressively powerful SoC that made its debut in the OLED iPad Pro launched earlier this year. Despite being held back by a passively cooled system, the M4 performed rather well, punching well above its weight class in both CPU and GPU benchmarks. The potent SoC will soon make its debut on the 14" and 16" MacBook Pro lineup, which, along with a redesigned Mac Mini and a refreshed 24" iMac, is set to see the light of day by the 30th of this month according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Gurman expects the new Macs to be unveiled via a pre-recorded live stream with a press release following soon after. His sources indicate that Apple is planning a hands-on event with creators next Wednesday, similar to what we witnessed last year. If his previous prediction holds true, Apple will finally unveil the higher-end M4 Pro and M4 Max SoCs for the MacBook Pro lineup. The redesigned Mac Mini will likely boast the M4 and M4 Pro SoCs, along with a major redesign that will entirely eliminate USB-A ports, opting instead for a USB-C-only solution. The 24" iMac, however, will be refreshed with the standard M4 alone.
If the recently leaked benchmark figures for the base 14" MacBook Pro are anything to go by, the M4 SoC, when actively cooled, outperforms Intel's Core Ultra 9 288V "Lunar Lake" chip by almost 60% in Cinebench 2024's multithreaded test. The M4's lead in single-core is equally impressive, hovering at around 40%. Even when compared to Apple's higher-tier M3 Pro SoC, the vanilla M4 demonstrates a substantial lead in single-core performance while being almost neck and neck in multi-core performance.
That being said, the M4-equipped Mac lineup is expected to be priced at a premium in typical Apple fashion. Word on the street suggests that the base variants for the M4-equipped Macs will now ship with 16 GB of unified memory instead of 8 GB, further increasing the probability of an impending price hike. The M4 Mac Mini will likely be the most affordable of the bunch, but that remains to be seen.
Source:
Mark Gurman
Gurman expects the new Macs to be unveiled via a pre-recorded live stream with a press release following soon after. His sources indicate that Apple is planning a hands-on event with creators next Wednesday, similar to what we witnessed last year. If his previous prediction holds true, Apple will finally unveil the higher-end M4 Pro and M4 Max SoCs for the MacBook Pro lineup. The redesigned Mac Mini will likely boast the M4 and M4 Pro SoCs, along with a major redesign that will entirely eliminate USB-A ports, opting instead for a USB-C-only solution. The 24" iMac, however, will be refreshed with the standard M4 alone.
That being said, the M4-equipped Mac lineup is expected to be priced at a premium in typical Apple fashion. Word on the street suggests that the base variants for the M4-equipped Macs will now ship with 16 GB of unified memory instead of 8 GB, further increasing the probability of an impending price hike. The M4 Mac Mini will likely be the most affordable of the bunch, but that remains to be seen.
12 Comments on Apple MacBook Pro, Mac mini and 24" iMac With M4 SoC Likely To Arrive Next Week
-JerryRigEverything
If you want to ratchet things up to developers this doesn't change. Once you rope in audio, video, and gfx professionals things do change a little. But in those cases all the newer stuff comes with USB-C anyways and you are typically connecting over thunderbolt to a dock or hub or whatever else for the added ports and functionality you need. Just as Macs handle their storage constraints by a NAS among power users, or hell you can slap a DAS to the dock if you lack a 10gb connection.
It actually all does "just work". It's completely hassle free and largely clutter free.
If that's the case, zero benefit for us consumers...
where you pay a monthly fee of $10 to not see their obvious BS product configuration when you log in.