Another week, another suite of press release-only-announced products. With the exception of the yearly (and mid-year) in-person WWDC, will we ever see Apple do another live event?

I digress. Some of what Apple’s rolled out (so far…it’s only Wednesday night as I write these words) this week was accurately prognosticated at the end of my last-week coverage. Some of it was near-spot-on forecasted, albeit with an unexpected (and still baffling, a day later) twist. And two of the system unveilings were a complete surprise, at least from a timing standpoint. At all the new system’s cores were processor updates (core…processor…get it?). And speaking of which, there’s a new one of those, as well. In chronological order, starting with Tuesday’s news…

The iPad Air(s)

Apple had migrated the iPad Air tablet from the M1 to the M2 SoC less than a year ago, at the same time expanding the product suite to include both 11” and 13” form factors. So when Tim Cook teased that “There’s something in the Air” on Monday, M3-based iPad Airs were not what I expected. But…whatevah… By the way, careful perusers of the press release might have already noticed that all the performance-improvement claims mentioned there were versus the 2022 M1-based model, not last year’s M2. That selective emphasis wasn’t an accident, folks.

And of course, there’s a new accompanying keyboard; heaven forbid Apple forego any available opportunity for obsolescence-by-design forced updates to its devoted customer base, yes? Sigh.

The iPad

This one didn’t even justify a press release of its own; instead, Apple tacked a paragraph and photo onto the end of the iPad Air announcement. Predictably, there were performance-improvement claims in that paragraph, and once again Apple jumped two product generations in making them, comparing against the September 2021 9^th-generation A13 Bionic-based iPad versus the year-later (but still 2.5 years old) 10^th-generation offering running the A14 Bionic SoC. And the doubled-up internal storage is nice. But here’s the surprising-to-me (and pretty much everyone else whose coverage I read) twist; the new 11^th-gen iPad is based on the A16 SoC.

“What’s the big deal, Dipert?” you might understandably be asking at this point. The big deal is that the A16 is not Apple Intelligence-compatible. On the one hand, I get it; the iPad is the lowest-priced offering in Apple’s tablet portfolio, so to maintain shareholder-friendly profit margins, the bill-of-materials cost must be similarly suppressed. But given how increasingly fiscal-reliant Apple is on the services segment of its business, I’m still shocked that Apple didn’t instead put the A17 Pro, already found in the latest iPad mini, into the new iPad too, along with enough RAM to enable AI capabilities. Maybe the company just wants to upsell everyone to the iPad Air and Pro instead? If so, I’ve got an intentionally terse response: “good luck with that”.

The MacBook Air(s)

This is what everyone thought Tim Cook was alluding to with Monday’s “There’s something in the Air” tease, in-advance suggested by dwindling inventory of existing M3-based products. And one day later than the iPad Air, they belatedly got their wish. That said, with the exception of a new sky blue scheme (No more Space Gray? You gotta be kidding me!), all the changes are on the inside. The M4 SoC (this time exclusively with a 10-core CPU, albeit in both 8-and-10-core GPU variants) is more energy-efficient than its M3 forebear; we’ve already discussed this. But Apple was even more comparison-silly this time, benchmarking against the three-generations-old (and more than four years old) M1 MacBook Air, as well as even more geriatric x86-based variants (Really, Apple? Isn’t it time to stop kicking Intel?). About the most notable thing I can say, aside from the price cut, is that akin to its M4 Mac mini sibling, the M4 MacBook Air now supports up to two external displays in addition to the integrated LCD, without any software-based (therefore CPU-burdening) DisplayLink hacks. Oh, and the front camera is improved. Yay.

The Mac Studio

Speaking of the Mac mini, let’s close by mentioning its bigger (albeit not biggest) brother, the Mac Studio. Until earlier today (again, as I write these words on Wednesday evening) the most powerful Mac Studios, introduced at the 2023 WWDC, were based on M2 SoC variants: the 12 CPU core and 30-or-38 GPU core M2 Max; and dual-die (interposer-connected) 24 CPU core and 60-or-76 GPU core M2 Ultra. They were follow-ups to 2022’s M1 Max (an example of which I own) and M1 Ultra premiere Mac Studio products. So, we were clearly (over)due for next-gen offerings. But, although the M1 versions were introduced in March, M2 successors arrived the following June. So, I’d placed my bets on the (likely June) 2025 WWDC for the next-gen launch timing.

Shows you how much (or accurately, little) I know…Apple instead decided on a 2022-era early-March re-do this time. And skipping past the M3 Max, the new “lower-end” (I chuckle to even type those words, and you’ll see why in second) version of the Mac Studio is based on the 14-or-16 CPU core, 32-or-40 GPU core, and 16 neural processing core M4 Max SoC also found in the latest high-end MacBook Pros.

The M3 Ultra SoC

But, at least for now (and maybe never?) there’s no M4 Ultra processor. Instead, Apple revisited the M3 architecture to come up with the M3 Ultra, its latest high-end SoC for the Mac Studio family. It holds 28-or-32 CPU cores, 60-or-80 GPU cores, and 32 neural processing cores, all prior-gen. I’m guessing the target market will still be satisfied with the available “muscle”, in spite of the generational back-step. And it’s more than just an interposer-connected dual-die M3 Max pairing. It also upgrades Thunderbolt capabilities to v5, previously found only on higher-end M4 SoC variants, and the max RAM to 512 GBytes (the M3 Max only supports 128 GBytes max…see what I did there?).

Maybe we’ll see a next-gen Mac Pro at WWDC, then? And maybe it (or if not, which of its other product line siblings) will be the first system implementation of the next-gen M5 SoC? Stand by. Until then, let me know your thoughts on this week’s announcements in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.

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