Supply chain gearing up to ship new MacBook Pro

The Apple supply chain is now preparing to start shipping new MacBook Pro models, at the same time that shipments of current models are starting to slip.

Apple is expected to hold a second special fall event in October, one that will likely feature the Mac and iPad segments of the company's product catalog. According to one report, the Mac side is just about ready to go, and mass assembly has begun.

According to a report on Tuesday morning from Digitimes, shipments of new MacBooks will be offset by slowing shipments of other models. The report claims that shipment volumes and will either be around the same as the late 2021 shipments, or slightly more.

In the market segment, Apple's shipments will allegedly endure the "smallest decline" in 2022 among the top six vendors, with a year-on-year decrease of just 1.4%. The rest of the list ranges from Asustek declining 9.2% to Acer dropping 33.2% year-on-year.

Sources say that Apple's the only computer producer still "pulling in orders" while other vendors saw shipment volumes drop by 40 to 50% year-on-year.

Apple assembly partner Quanta Computer enjoyed record revenues in July and August, driven by a deferral of orders from the second quarter caused by lockdowns in Shanghai, as well as production of the MacBook Pro in August.

The report didn't detail what Apple could be bringing out in its MacBook Pro lineup, but the current expectation is a shift to M2 Pro and M2 Max chips for the 14-inch MacBook Pro and the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

5 Comments

blastdoor 3568 comments · 15 Years

About 2 years ago

While the notion of 3nm M2 Pro/Max now seems highly unlikely, I wonder if they might be fabbed on 4nm (like the A16)?

TSMC's 4nm process is a refinement of the 5nm. I believe it uses the same design rules as 5nm, which means that Apple need not change the design of the CPU and GPU cores in the 5nm M2 for use in a 4nm M2 Pro/Max.

tht 5594 comments · 23 Years

blastdoor said:

While the notion of 3nm M2 Pro/Max now seems highly unlikely, I wonder if they might be fabbed on 4nm (like the A16)?

TSMC's 4nm process is a refinement of the 5nm. I believe it uses the same design rules as 5nm, which means that Apple need not change the design of the CPU and GPU cores in the 5nm M2 for use in a 4nm M2 Pro/Max.

I don’t think there is much difference between N5P and N4. Apple will be able to eek out 10% to 20% performance gains from either just as they did between M1 to M2 or A15 to A16.

Apple does need to fix the poor GPU core scaling in their SoCs. Perhaps it is a memory controller issue, whatever it is, it needs to be fixed. That’s probably the number 1 thing they needed to have worked on over the past 2 years.

M2 Pro MBP models to be announced just in time for an M1 Pro MBP16 refresh from work is just about to arrive at my desk. 😄

Lots of things that they can do. They could have a 10+4+20 config for the M2 Pro. 10 p-cores, 4 e-cores and 20 GPU cores. Memory configs could be 16, 32, 48 GB. M2 Max could be 10+4+40 and memory capacity to 96 GB. Too bad the rumor seems to be 8 p-cores and 4 e-cores.

The HDMI port could be updated to HDMI 2.1. The SD card slot could be faster. Too early for next gen TB and USB. Still disappointed that cellular modems have not made it into Macs yet.

Lots of things that they could do in the Mac space.

tenthousandthings 1060 comments · 17 Years

blastdoor said:

While the notion of 3nm M2 Pro/Max now seems highly unlikely, I wonder if they might be fabbed on 4nm (like the A16)?

TSMC's 4nm process is a refinement of the 5nm. I believe it uses the same design rules as 5nm, which means that Apple need not change the design of the CPU and GPU cores in the 5nm M2 for use in a 4nm M2 Pro/Max.

Yes, I think that is likely.

A14 and M1 are N5
A15 and M2 are N5P
A16 is N4P [?]
M2 Pro/Max will also be N4P

The above seems pretty certain. Beyond that, the M2 Ultra+ is less clear. I think March 2023.

Marvin 15336 comments · 18 Years

blastdoor said:

While the notion of 3nm M2 Pro/Max now seems highly unlikely, I wonder if they might be fabbed on 4nm (like the A16)?

TSMC's 4nm process is a refinement of the 5nm. I believe it uses the same design rules as 5nm, which means that Apple need not change the design of the CPU and GPU cores in the 5nm M2 for use in a 4nm M2 Pro/Max.

It's possible that they will use N4/N4P. M2 uses N5P vs N5 for M1 (20 billion transistors vs 16 billion). The following table lists some of the different nodes, the gains N4 offers haven't been documented but are usually described as not much improved from N5P:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16639/tsmc-update-2nm-in-development-3nm-4nm-on-track-for-2022

There's also an N4X for higher clock speeds but that looks like it's further out in 2024:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17123/tsmc-unveils-n4x-node-high-voltages-for-high-clocks

Apple managed to get a good performance increase from N5P, the following videos show 40-50% performance increases over M1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnG2srcs4Fg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoezEbpG7bM

Apple has a lot of headroom for power draw in the actively cooled Mac models so even without much density improvements, they can add more cores. N3 gives a big boost to the transistor density but if they can get a 40% boost this year from N5P/N4/N4P in the Pro models, it wouldn't be too bad using N3 next year.