Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

slwvx

The URL above is wrong. At present it is https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articlehttps://www.bloomberg.... I guess it should be https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/apple-to-...

evanjrowley

Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released. I suspect this is a marketing ploy to meant to drive up both interest while also increasing prices for the next generation of Mac hardware.

vessenes

The article says base M7 memory bandwidth is targeted at 240GB/s. M1 had 70 GB/s, M1 Pro: 200, M1 Max 400, M1 Ultra 800. Modern RTX 6000: ~1,600 or so. If we get a 1,200-1,500 GB/s bandwidth M7 variant in late 2027 with 512GB of RAM, that will be a very interesting chip. Tracking LLM size and performance improvements, I can imagine that being a sort of inflection point for local inference. I wonder what the power budget would be in desktop format.

dools

Bro just give me a new iPhone mini

behnamoh

Apple is very late to the AI party. By the time M7 is shipped, Nvidia will announce 6090 and people will be buying used (3|4|5)090 GPUs to run local models at much better performance than heat throttled M7.

aurareturn

The M7 Pro and M7 Max are scheduled for as early as the end of 2027, while the M7 Ultra is on track for 2028. This means there won't be a redesigned MBP this year since there won't be M6 Pro/Max chips. People were expecting a redesigned slimmer MBP with OLED display later this year, myself included. I was holding out for one until I decided to switch from an M1 Pro 16" MBP to an M5 Air 15" due to the expected price increase. I think many M1 Pro/Max generation people were waiting to upgrade this year.

alberth

Given that M6 will be on TSMC smaller 2nm node and the first smaller node size in 3-years, it seems like the oddest of all years for the high-end Macs to skip.

Detrytus

Everyone seems to miss it but the article also says that M5 Ultra Mac Studio is coming out later this year. Yay! I wonder how much the rumored 768GB RAM version will cost.

watersb

Former AnandTech editor Gavin Bonshor had reports that the M7 would be manufactured on Intel's 18A node. https://bontechlabs.com/news/apple-is-reportedly-using-intel... Given the risks involved in establishing Apple Silicon designs with a new fab, I would expect early M7 parts to be in test production right now. The fundamental M7 design is already set in stone. Mark Gurman's Bloomberg article does not mention fabrication partners or processes.

g42gregory

How about we release M5 Ultra first?

teaearlgraycold

Well this kind of sucks. I've been waiting for the M6 MBPs because they're rumored (strong rumors, though) to finally remove the notch that has been a historic self-own. But it sounds like I might as well wait longer for the M7 lineup. Or maybe get a Framework Pro instead.

thrill

Come on Apple - just buy TSMC and fully kit out the RAM in all Mac Studios - you could even make (more of) a fortune selling the excess.

GeekyBear

Apple isn't just transitioning to TSMC's 2nm node, they are also transitioning to a chiplet based design using TSMC's advanced packaging. > What sets the A20 apart isn’t just the node shrink—it’s the revolution in packaging. Apple is transitioning to Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WLCM) integration, meaning that RAM will no longer be situated beside the chip, but rather on the chip wafer itself, integrated alongside the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. This shift eliminates the need for silicon interposers and substrates, thereby enhancing signal integrity, improving thermal dissipation, and facilitating faster memory access with lower latency. The benefits? Better multitasking, smoother AI processing (hello, Apple Intelligence), improved battery life, and potentially a smaller chip footprint—freeing up space for other components. https://hwbusters.com/news/apples-a20-chip-ushers-in-a-new-e... It's entirely possible that TSMC is ramping up more slowly than expected.

MisterKent

Apple is actually interesting. They are one of the few companies with a chip / PC play with real power AND basically no play I'm the hyperscalar market. That means they're actually incentivized at least short term, to benefit PCs becoming strong enough to do local LLMs. Which makes this play make even more sense. Though, I've been saying for a while that the local AI inflectiom point is the death knell for these frontier labs.

ggm

What's their backup plan if the AI world doesn't pan out? What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs? Maybe this strategy works, even in that world. Remember when we all thought (were told we thought) the world was heading to 3D views of our 2D lived experience like a solid Cube of GUI we could rotate around and live inside? Well Apple took the simple 2D square pane of virtual desktops and .. made it a SONY strip. One variable: sideways. So here we are being told AI is the future. Apple seems to be saying "yes but it will run local" which might be a safe bet if AI comes true but I wonder how many of us want the AI outcome, which is morally speaking the 3D immersive GUI cube here: what if we don't want that?

an0malous

I was waiting for a MacBook Pro M6 Max and now I don’t know what to do, especially with the price increase I feel like I really screwed up not just getting an MBP M5 Max a month ago

sho

Well, I guess this is the silver lining to the price increases. I'd been thinking about an M5 128GB for local inference (eg DS4), probably off the table now given that it jumped $2k overnight. But I was on the fence about it for a long time given that even the M5 is not that good compared to even a 4090. It would have been good, but not "omg" good. If they are pulling out all the stops to make the M7 more competitive.. guess I can wait for that?

pipeline_peak

Local AI isn’t gonna help Apple, especially not with the rate hardware prices are increasing. They need to pull out of this half assed bandwagon approach.

moomoo11

really stupid question, but why doesn't the US gov work with someone like apple to build a american fab with like 1 trillion dollars budget? some kind of private-public partnership sorry if thats already happening in some capacity, like i said - "stupid question"

gigatexal

There’s not a lot of detail in the article but that doesn’t mean we have to link to a pay walled thing. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/2027-macs-m7-chips/