Linked List: March 5, 2025

Wednesday, 5 March 2025

Apple Announces, With Much Surprise, Mac Studios With M4 Max and M3 Ultra (!) Chips ★

Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

With the M4 Mac mini being powerfully tempting for desktop Mac users who crave power, Apple has upgraded the Mac Studio to blast past the mini in terms of performance. The base model, still starting at $1999, is powered by the M4 Max chip previously available only in the M4 MacBook Pro. And the new high-end Mac Studio, starting at the same $3999 price tag, is powered by a monstrous chip with 32 CPU cores (including 24 performance cores) and up to 80 GPU cores. It’s a chip never seen before anywhere — the M3 Ultra.

You heard me. For Apple’s fastest Mac ever — and it’s clear that it will be — Apple’s shipping a chip based on two high-end chips (fused together with Apple’s UltraFusion technology) from Apple’s previous processor generation. Weird, right? It seems like a few things are going on here: first, that the development of the Ultra chip takes longer and that Apple won’t commit to shipping an Ultra chip in every chip generation. Second, that the first-generation three-nanometer chip process of Apple’s chipmaking partner, TSMC, isn’t as dead and buried as generally thought. Just this week Apple also introduced an iPad Air with an M3 processor, and of course the new iPad mini shipped with an A17 Pro processor based on the same process.

This M3/M4 generational fork — the M3 Ultra chip debuting in new Mac Studio models alongside the M4 Max — was so unexpected that, during my embargoed press briefing about the news yesterday, I thought the Apple rep misspoke when he said M3, not M4, for the Ultra models. But no, the Ultra chip really is a generation behind. When asked the obvious question — why — Apple’s answer was straightforward: the Ultra chips take a lot longer to engineer.

The M4 Max Studio models are, computationally, equivalent (exactly, I think) with the M4 Max MacBook Pros that debuted October 30, maxing out (no pun intended) at 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, 8 TB of storage, and 128 GB of RAM. The M4 Max Studio models start at $2,000, but that starting price only gets you a 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 512 GB of storage, and a measly 36 GB of RAM.

The intriguing M3 Ultra models start at $4,000, which gets you a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 1 TB of storage, and a healthy 96 GB of RAM. Available upgrades to, uh, ultra out the Ultra models:

32-core CPU + 80-core GPU: +$1,500
256 GB of RAM: +$1,600
512 GB of RAM: +$4,000 (only available with the 32-core CPU/80-core GPU)

SSD storage options for the Ultra models go up to 16 TB (a cool $4,600 over the base storage).

Apple Announces, With Little Surprise, M4 MacBook Airs ★

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Let’s start with the surprises. Both M4 MacBook Air models are priced $100 less than their predecessors: $1199 for the 15-inch model and $999 for the 13-incher. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that the new-generation design of MacBook Air introduced with the M2 chip has been available at the classic $999 price at launch. (The M1 Air, based on the Intel-era visual design, debuted at $999, but the M2 Air debuted at $1199 and only reached $999 when it was offered as an older model alongside the M3 Air.) As of now, the M4 Air can hold down the sub-$1000 price point all on its own, and previous models are mostly discontinued.

Another surprise is the the new color option: Space Gray is out. The ultra-dark-blue Midnight remains, as do the classic Silver and hint-of-champagne Starlight. The new color is Sky Blue, which apparently is a metallic light blue that really shows itself as a color gradient when viewed at various angles.

Very cool that the new M4 starts at $999. Each successive generation of Apple Silicon, at least in laptops, is getting more and more predictably regular.

Who Cares About Getting News That’s True When You’re Getting It Fast With a $32,000/Year Bloomberg Terminal Subscription? ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg on 6 December 2024, regarding Apple’s first in-house cellular modem, “Apple Plans Three-Year Modem Rollout in Bid to Top Qualcomm”:

For now, the modem won’t be used in Apple’s higher-end products. It’s set to come to a new mid-tier iPhone later next year, code-named D23, that features a far-thinner design than current models. The chip will also start rolling out as early as 2025 in Apple’s lower-end iPads.

We now know the name of that modem, the C1, from its debut in the iPhone 16e last month. Then, also on December 6, in a separate report headlined “Apple Explores Macs, Headsets With Built-In Cellular Data”:

The first modem will also appear in low-end iPads next year, with the 2026 update coming to Pro versions of the iPhone and iPad.

The cellular models of the new 11th generation iPads announced yesterday do not, it turns out, use the C1. The specs don’t match those of the iPhone 16e, and when I asked an Apple representative, they confirmed that none of the new iPads (including the Airs) use the C1 modem. (But, Apple reassured me, they all offer terrific cellular networking.)

I’m not saying Gurman was wrong, because there are nine full months left in 2025 for Apple to release a 12th-generation low-end iPad with the C1. The previous (10th) generation came out in October 2022, but the 9th generation came in September 2021, just 13 months prior. And this week’s new M3 iPad Airs replaced M2 models that arrived just 10 months ago. But, you know, it sure seems doubtful Apple is going to rev this hardware in 2025, so I’ll place my bet that he was wrong about this too.

(And yes, a Bloomberg Terminal subscription really does start at $32,000/year per seat.)

Mark Gurman, Ace Reporter, on the New Regular iPads ★

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg, on January 12:

The new entry-level iPads — J481 and J482 — will get faster processors and Apple Intelligence. The current models have the A14 chip and 4 gigabytes of memory. Look for the new versions to have the A17 Pro chip, matching the iPad mini, and a bump to 8 gigabytes of memory. That’s the minimum needed to support the new AI platform.

The new iPads sport the A16 chip and thus do not support Apple Intelligence. But who cares about little details like that when you know the codenames, which is what really matters.

I’ll bet what happened is that Gurman was right, and the new iPads were set to use the A17 Pro chip and support Apple Intelligence. But after Gurman spoiled it seven weeks ago, Apple scrapped those plans and changed the chips to the A16 just to spite him.

Tapbots Releases Ivory 2.3 – and Announces That Phoenix, a Bluesky Client, Is Coming ★

Tapbots:

v2.3 is now available on the App Store for Mac and iOS/iPadOS! What’s new?

Grouped Notifications (Mention and Notification tabs are now merged)

Support for AlphaNumeric Post IDs (Can now log into more services like GoToSocial)

Accessibility Improvements

Bug Fixes

I don’t like grouped notifications, but I’ve got nothing to complain about, because there’s a simple toggle at the top to just show mentions. Perfect.

The big news from Tapbots, though, is the announcement of Phoenix, a dedicated client for Bluesky:

Why two different clients? Why not one that supports both?

While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan to provide a way to cross-post between them so you don’t have to write duplicate posts.

Hear hear to that.

Your Source for Scoops Half a Day Before They’re Announced Publicly ★

Mark Gurman, yesterday at noon ET:

It’s not an “Air” — but the new Mac Studio, codenamed J575, appears to be imminent. It could be announced as early as this week along with the new MacBook Airs. There are signs these will come with an M4 Max but that its new Ultra chip will actually be an M3 Ultra.

Quite the scoop breaking this news after Apple started briefing media about it under NDA yesterday.

He’s not fooling anyone by dropping the J575 codename (which Apple would never include in a media briefing). That’s a bit of ham-fisted misdirection to make it seem like his source for this came from a product-aware source inside Apple, when in fact he almost certainly got it from someone in the media yesterday. (Codenames in and of themselves aren’t much of a secret inside Apple. That’s one reason they keep them so boring: letter-digit-digit-digit, usually.)

Apple conducted virtual media briefings yesterday for the iPad (M3 iPad Airs and A16 regular iPads) and Mac (M4 MacBook Airs and M4 Max/M3 Ultra Mac Studios). Apple announced the new iPads on Apple Newsroom yesterday morning at 9:00am ET, before those media briefings took place — the briefings were a recap of the announced news. Apple announced the new Macs today at 9:00am ET, after yesterday’s media briefings, which were under embargo until this morning. If you think it’s a coincidence that Gurman dropped zero last-minute tidbits about the new iPads (which were not briefed to the press ahead of time), but did drop the surprise M3 Ultra Mac Studio news (which was briefed, under embargo, ahead of time), I have a bridge to sell you.

He did the same thing with the VisionOS 2.4 news (Apple Intelligence, the new Spatial Gallery app, guest mode improvements). Apple held media briefings to share this news on Friday 14 February, under the condition that it was embargoed until the VisionOS 2.4 beta dropped the next week. But Gurman ran a report at Bloomberg with the embargoed info on Saturday 15 February. The only stuff he’s right about lately is what he gets from someone (or someones?) in the media leaking him embargoed info. It’s not going to take Sherlock Holmes for Apple to figure this out, especially when most of the Mac briefings yesterday were later in the day, after Gurman’s tweets. I’d put even money on him burning his source yesterday.