Apple’s M3 MacBooks are coming, but probably not this year: Shipment forecast

The M3 chip-powered MacBooks won’t arrive until 2024, according to a new report.

MaBook Air, powered by the M1 chip (Image credit: Nandagopal Rajan/The Indian Express)

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Apple fans who are eagerly waiting for the next generation of MacBooks powered by the company’s own M3 chip may have to wait a little longer. According to a new report by DigiTimes, Apple will not launch its first MacBooks based on TSMC’s 3nm fabrication process until 2024. This contradicts some earlier rumours that suggested Apple could announce new Macs with the M3 chip as soon as this year.

The report, which is based on a five-year global notebook shipments forecast, predicts that the notebook market will rebound in 2024 with a 4.7% shipment growth, driven by the easing of inflation and the introduction of new products, including new MacBooks with 3nm-based chips. The report also claims that Apple will experience a significant decline in shipments in 2023, as it plans to transition to the 3nm node for performance upgrading in 2024.

The M3 chip is expected to offer significant performance and power efficiency improvements over the current M2 chip, which is fabricated with TSMC’s 5nm process and debuted in June 2022. The M3 chip will also likely feature a new GPU with hardware ray-tracing, a feature that was first introduced on the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro chip last month.

Also read | New iPads on the horizon: What to expect from upcoming Mini, Air & Pro models

Apple has been steadily updating its Mac lineup with its own silicon, starting with the M1 chip in November 2021. The latest is the M2 chip, which was launched in June 2022, and powers the MacBook Air Pro, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro models.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has previously reported that Apple will launch new versions of these models with M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, which will offer more cores and more graphics power than the regular M3 chip. He said that these new MacBook Pro models will “probably” launch by the middle of 2024 at the latest.

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