Here comes the M4 chip, the super king of Apple’s AI PC.

Wen | Lei Technology

This year, after Apple announced the cancellation of the car-making plan, it finally made up its mind to allocate more energy to the AI project. The M3 MacBook Air just released and the upcoming iOS 18 correspond to Apple’s first answer sheet on the AI PC and AI mobile phone tracks respectively.

IOS 18 has not yet been released, and everyone can only guess Apple’s next move from many sources. However, judging from the performance of the released M3 MacBook Air, it seems that the number of AI computing cores, performance and even NPU of M3 chips are difficult to support Apple’s AI PC business in the face of the encirclement formed by a variety of AI PC competing products in the market. The new M3 MacBook Air was sold at a discount of $100 on Amazon only one month after it was put on the shelves.

However, the situation that M3 chip alone supports Apple AI PC is about to change: Apple M4 series chips may have to meet with you in advance. Mark Gurman, a reporter from Bloomberg, pointed out in the latest issue of Power On newsletter that Apple’s M4 chip is close to the mass production stage, and it will be loaded into the latest Mac devices as soon as the end of this year. The focus of this series of chips will be on improving the performance of handling AI tasks.

M4 chip focuses on AI performance and will cover the full-stack product line of Mac.

Considering that Apple released M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max chips in October last year, Mark Gurman predicted that Apple would also launch M4 series chips around October this year. Last year, M3 series chips were sought after by many consumers for their performance, dynamic cache, mesh coloring and rendering, and hardware-level ray tracing acceleration technology.

This year, the upgrade of M4 series chips will focus on the number of AI computing cores, efficiency and NPU. It is reported that the M4 series chips to be produced by Apple are expected to have at least three main models, namely, the low-end chip Donan, the mid-end chip Brava and the high-end chip Hidra. The above names are all code names, and the officially listed names are likely to follow the M4, M4 Pro, M4 Max and M4 Ultra of M3.

Not only that, M4 series chips will also cover the whole Mac product line. Among them, the new iMac, entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro, high-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, 16-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini models will be the first batch of MAC products equipped with M4 series chips, which are expected to be launched one after another from the end of this year to the beginning of next year.

In the first quarter of 2025, Apple will update the 13-inch and 15-inch M4 MacBook Air models, update the Mac Studio in the middle of the year, and update the Mac Pro in the third or fourth quarter.

Apple reorganized the Mac product line with M4 series chips, which has different significance for different products in the product line. For Mac mini, Mac Pro and Mac Studio, this is a rare intergenerational update. Previously, the latest models of the three products were only equipped with M2 chip, and their performance had already lagged behind other Mac products. Whether Apple directly skipped M3 chip and upgraded to M4 chip or inserted M3 chip into the original update rhythm step by step, with the current news, it is still impossible to draw a conclusion.

However, Lei Technology believes that according to Apple’s habit, it is not impossible for Apple to release M3 and M4 products at the same time, so the price of M4 products may hit a new high in this series.

For the newly upgraded M3 MacBook Air, it is expected that the M4 model released next year will exert great sales pressure on M3 model, and the shortened update time may make some consumers feel at ease as a "waiting party", and then make a decision after the release of M4 MacBook Air. This also means that M3 MacBook Air will accelerate the clearance and dumping of goods, which is expected to be greatly promoted at key promotion nodes such as 618.

The significance of AI Mac to Apple has surpassed the product itself.

According to the global PC sales in 2023 released by data research organization IDC, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the global PC shipments were about 259.5 million units, down 13.9% compared with 2022. Among them, Apple’s shipments ranked fourth, down 22.4% year-on-year. Although Apple’s shipments in the fourth quarter of 2023 improved, increasing by 10.1% year-on-year, from the annual data, Apple’s decline in the PC market is very obvious, and the decline rate far exceeds that of other PC manufacturers.

In fact, not only in the PC market, but also in other fields. A series of events such as the "Titan" project shelved for ten years, the iPad shipment was overtaken by Huawei tablet, the word-of-mouth of Vision Pro was extended, and the price of iPhone 15 series was successively reduced, which made Apple feel overwhelmed.

The outside world is generally not optimistic about Apple’s expectations, which is embodied in the investment market. As of the close of the US stock market on April 10, Apple’s share price has fallen by about 13% this year. It was not until the news that M4 series chips reorganized the Mac product line came out that Apple’s share price rose, with a total increase of more than 5% in two days.

It can be seen that the significance of AI Mac to Apple has far exceeded the scope of ordinary products. It represents the apple that the outside world wants to see more, and it also means that Apple has finally returned to the "right track" that the public thinks. Apple continues to iterate AI Mac products through M4 series chips. On the one hand, it can inject new power into the Mac product line whose shipments are already declining in 2023 and stimulate the sales of the Mac product line; On the other hand, AI PC has become the hottest topic in the PC market. Many PC manufacturers have either launched the first AI PC or are on the way to release it. If Apple keeps the iterative pace of the past few years, it is likely that the PC shipments in 2024 will further decline.

M4 Mac will add another fire to AI PC.

If we want to select the hottest keywords in the technology industry in 2024, Lei Technology believes that it is "AI". At present, AI has penetrated into all walks of life. AI mobile phone, AI TV, AI audio, AI kitchen appliances, AI music, AI headphones and the AI PC we are talking about today all represent the reconstruction of an industry by AI.

Microsoft and Glory have successively released their own AI PC products. Whether it is Microsoft’s Surface Pro 10 commercial version and Surface Laptop 6 commercial version, or the glory MagicBook Pro 16, they are all highly anticipated by their respective manufacturers.

In addition, Microsoft and Qualcomm jointly built the Snapdragon X Elite chip, and plan to launch the Surface product with this processor later this year. It is reported that Microsoft executives are very satisfied with the performance of Snapdragon X Elite chip, and think that it can surpass Apple’s MacBook Air equipped with M3 chip in terms of CPU performance and handling various AI tasks.

Lenovo also plans to officially release the first real AI PC on the 18th of this month. The biggest highlight of this product is that it will be equipped with a personal model AI TWIN (artificial intelligence twin) with a local knowledge base. According to the official introduction, the so-called AI TWIN means that by establishing a local knowledge base on the device, you can better understand the user’s behavior habits, even predict tasks according to your thinking mode, and find solutions on your own. It eventually evolved into a digital extension of users, just like twins.

It can be said that almost all PC manufacturers are going further and further on the road of AI PC. The addition of Apple’s AI Mac has made the already highly competitive PC industry more chaotic. Although Apple’s PC shipments in 2023 are not ideal, I believe that no PC manufacturer can ignore the influence of Apple products.

It’s better than Microsoft. The joint venture with Qualcomm to build Snapdragon X Elite chip only claims that its performance exceeds M3 MacBook Air. When Apple officially launches M4 series chips, perhaps the current PC industry will usher in a new round of reshuffle.

With AI hardware alone, Apple can’t turn the tide.

Apple’s "toothpaste-squeezing" update is nothing new. Although the performance of M3 series chips is basically improved by 10%-20% compared with M2 series, it obviously cannot meet the high expectations of some users for its performance. At present, we still don’t know how much the M4 series chips have improved compared with the M3 series chips. According to the news, the M4 series chips that are highly anticipated by Apple may really bring a good competitive advantage to Apple’s Mac product line.

However, no matter how superior the hardware conditions are, they can’t be separated from the landing scene after all, and users’ judgment on the quality of product experience comes more from practical applications. On M3 MacBook Air, we have seen the native functions of the system, such as real-time speech to text, translation, text prediction, visual understanding, and auxiliary functions, as well as the AI functions under the AI application ecology, such as Pixelmator Pro automatically enhancing photos and CapCut eliminating background noise in videos.

Although these functions are not amazing, they are quite satisfactory, but Lei Technology believes that AI Mac has not really played the traditional advantages of Apple’s ecology, such as using OS to connect different devices in series and build an application ecosystem, or launching AI OS for the era of generative AGI (universal artificial intelligence).

Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had a discussion with Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, which are owned by Alphabet. It is not excluded to introduce one or more AI models into iOS 18 to provide the news of generating AI chat robot function for iOS system, and related news of cooperation with Baidu has also been reported in China.

If Apple is only an AI hardware provider, this win-win approach is obviously wise, but Apple is a technology company famous for its innovation and intelligence. In the short term, adopting alternatives may be acceptable to most users, but in the long run, this practice will always fall into the next ride. This is still the case in the mobile phone market. If Apple adopts a similar approach in the PC market, I believe that even if the M4 series chips with super performance are launched, it will be difficult to reverse the current unfavorable situation of Apple in the PC market.

Lei Technology still hopes that Apple can develop more eco-related practical applications on the new AI Mac and bring more AI usage scenarios to users. If it can really reach the above level, perhaps M4 series chips will lead Apple’s Mac product line to rebound.