Apple is working on big upgrades to its most powerful Macs, the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro – and the former is intended to launch in the second half of 2024 with a new and more powerful variant of the M3 processor, the M3 Ultra.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the so far unannounced processor will double the components of the M3 Max, which means it'll have a whopping 32 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores.
That ties in with previous reports that the Mac Studio was likely to launch at the WWDC developers' conference in June 2024, which is when Apple gets its army of app developers together to show them the future of its operating systems. It's often where Apple introduces its most pro Macs too.
What to expect from the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro
According to Gurman, previous reports of the Mac Pro's demise are premature. Apple's high-end workstation is too new to be headed for the scrapheap already, he suggests, and he says it's highly likely that Apple will refresh its most powerful Mac with the same new M3 processor as the Studio. That's all he can say with confidence so far.
This is likely to be a relatively quiet year for the Mac: while we're expecting to see new MacBooks including a new M3 MacBook Air this year, possibly as soon as March, we've already seen big upgrades to the MacBook Pro line including the MacBook Pro M3 and we're not expecting significant hardware changes to any of the best-selling Macs this year beyond the usual speed bumps. We're also expecting the iPhone 16 to be a relatively small upgrade in terms of the "wow factor": it'll be an interesting upgrade, of course, but it's likely to be an evolutionary one.
That doesn't mean Apple is going to have a quiet 2024, though. Far from it. On the hardware front Apple has its hands full with other products: the Vision Pro, of course, but also significant upgrades to and reshuffling of the 2024 iPad line. And there are rumblings of big things on the artificial intelligence front too, which if true we're likely to see revealed at WWDC this summer.
