Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman reports that Apple could completely skip the M3 generation for some Macs, most notably the Mac mini, launching a new M4 Mac mini as soon as this year.

Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
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To be clear, Gurman doesn’t have specific insider information confirming that Apple is planning to skip the M3 mini. But based on Apple’s alleged late-2024-into-early-2025 timeline for the M4 mini, he believes that it’s “probably safe to say” that there’s not enough space on the calendar for an M3 mini to be released between now and then.

This wouldn’t be the first time an Apple Silicon Mac had skipped a chip generation—the 24-inch iMac was never updated with the M2, instead jumping directly from the M1 to the M3. The Mac Pro also skipped the M1 series, leapfrogging from Intel chips to the M2.

But if the M4 does come out by the end of 2024, it would be a much faster turnaround than we’ve seen for other Apple Silicon chips so far. Roughly a year and a half passed between the introduction of the first M1 Macs in late 2020 and the first M2 Macs in the summer of 2022; about the same amount of time passed between mid-2022 and the late-2023 introduction of the first M3 Macs.

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MacDailyNews Take: With each passing day, M3 sounds more and more like a placeholder – and a short one at that.

See also: Apple preps dramatic overhaul of entire Mac line powered by AI-focused M4 chips – April 11, 2024
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