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The Mac Studio and Mac Pro aren’t due for an upgrade to Apple’s M4 chip until the middle of next year. That means both machines will still be on Apple’s M2 generation this year, unlike all other Macs except the MacBook Air, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman wrote to Power On subscribers today.
Throughout 2024, though, all of Apple’s laptops (except the MacBook Air) will move to the M4 chip that the company just gave the iPad Pro, Gurman writes. Amusingly, this herky-jerky chip upgrade cycle means that the iPad Pro is currently the single-core performance champ of Apple’s lineup — and it will continue to be for about another year, when compared to the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
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It’s not even close, according to comparisons on Geekbench, which regularly show the iPad Pro outdoing the the M2 Ultra by roughly 25 percent. If we want to be silly about it, even the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro chip is about on par with the M2 Ultra in single-core CPU power. Neither matters — the M2 Ultra will still smoke either when multiple cores are needed, and that’s where it really counts. (Apparently that’s not the case for my M1 Max Mac Studio, which puts up slightly lower multi-core numbers than the new iPad Pro.)
This is a silly comparison, of course — The current crop of Mac Studios and Mac Pros are incredible computers that hold more RAM, have more ports, and won’t throttle as quickly as the iPad Pro, even with that heat-conducting Apple logo. They also don’t have an operating system that stands squarely in the way of pushing their hardware. And high-end Mac users should be used to waiting a while between revisions. Still, I’m sure more than a few people will appreciate the upgrade when it comes.
