M3 MacBook Pro & MacBook Air edge closer to early 2024 release

2022 MacBook Air

Apple's M3 lineup is getting closer to launch, with updated MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models hitting important engineering test stages as they head towards mass production.

The M3 range of Mac models is widely anticipated to arrive soon, with many looking towards the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines for potential upgrades. In one report, it seems that both MacBook Pro models and MacBook Air units are arriving at very important stages of the production process.

According to Mark Gurman in his "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro equipped with M3 Pro and M3 Max chips are at the DVT stage. Standing for Design Validation Test, the stage is one that's close to the start of the models entering mass production.

Gurman believes that the progress points to a launch between early 2024 and spring 2024. If accurate, this roughly coincides with the January 2023 release of the 14-inch and 16-inch M2 MacBook Pro models. The 2023 flagship MacBook Pro models arrived 14 months after the M1 models hit shelves.

The 13-inch MacBook Air and 15-inch MacBook Air are a little behind the Pro models, having just entered EVT, or Engineering Verification Test. Gurman offers the timing would put the models as releasing between the spring and summer of 2024.

The report doesn't bode well for an Apple Silicon product launch before the end of 2023, as other leakers have proposed a fall launch seems unlikely for the M3 generation at all.

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13 Comments

netguru2000

said about 6 months ago

Isn't this from the same guy that said 13" M3 Air would be arriving sometime around... today?

libertyandfree

said about 6 months ago

There is zero marketing reasons to release the M3 series this calendar year. Once the M3’s are announced there will be no more M2 upgrades. Since the iMac is still using the M1 maybe Apple will be bumping the iMac to an M2 series before releasing the M3’s in 2024.

tht

said about 6 months ago

Hmm… you would think the M3 would be produced before the M3 Pro/Max. Smaller chip, TSMC N3 is still new, less risk with a smaller chip. The M2 MBA13 is 16 months old now. The M3 Ivan go into a whole lot of products: MBA, Mac mini, iMac, iPad Pro and the Vision Pro.

Like for every M3 Pro or M3 Max chip shipped, there is 10 M3 chips shipped.

9secondkox2

said about 6 months ago

tht said:

Hmm… you would think the M3 would be produced before the M3 Pro/Max. Smaller chip, TSMC N3 is still new, less risk with a smaller chip. The M2 MBA13 is 16 months old now. The M3 Ivan go into a whole lot of products: MBA, Mac mini, iMac, iPad Pro and the Vision Pro.

Like for every M3 Pro or M3 Max chip shipped, there is 10 M3 chips shipped.

I don’t know. In the pc market, the cheap CPUs are the big sellers with high end systems more niche. But with apple, lots of customers opt for higher end systems. We see this even in the iPhone market. Would be great to see a true product spec breakdown of Mac sales numbers. I suspect the pro and max chips make up a much larger portion of the mix than many would suspect. That said, I don’t really expect max processors to arrive before base. I could see a simultaneous release though - so the vision pro can be viewed as its own special thing in its own window. Unfortunately, that seems to be the main thing messing with mac progress.

tht

said about 6 months ago

9secondkox2 said:

tht said:

Hmm… you would think the M3 would be produced before the M3 Pro/Max. Smaller chip, TSMC N3 is still new, less risk with a smaller chip. The M2 MBA13 is 16 months old now. The M3 Ivan go into a whole lot of products: MBA, Mac mini, iMac, iPad Pro and the Vision Pro.

Like for every M3 Pro or M3 Max chip shipped, there is 10 M3 chips shipped.

I don’t know. In the pc market, the cheap CPUs are the big sellers with high end systems more niche. But with apple, lots of customers opt for higher end systems. We see this even in the iPhone market. Would be great to see a true product spec breakdown of Mac sales numbers. I suspect the pro and max chips make up a much larger portion of the mix than many would suspect. That said, I don’t really expect max processors to arrive before base. I could see a simultaneous release though - so the vision pro can be viewed as its own special thing in its own window. Unfortunately, that seems to be the main thing messing with mac progress.

Apple's Mac ASP is about $1300 to $1500 depending on quarter. That likely means upwards of 60% to 70% of Mac sales are Mac mini, Macbook Airs and iMacs, probably with about 50% being MBA sales. It really is somewhere around 10-to-1 for M1/M2 versus their Pro/Max counterparts, especially with iPads shipping with Mx SoCs.

Hopefully, for the next round, an M2 MBA will start at $1000, an M1 iMac at $1000, and even an M2 Mac mini at $500, but this would be unlikely. Pricing is a big driver for when things can ship too. Apple has to wait for component prices to be right. For Pro Mac models, it's much more forgiving, so maybe that's the reason for the M3 Pro/Max systems being ahead of M3 systems.