Apple Just Surprised Everyone With the M4 Chip
Apple’s iPad announcements are usually quick and low-key: update the screen, put the latest MacBook chip in the iPad Pro, throw in a few skits for fun, and call it a day. But today’s iPad event surprised everyone by introducing the next Apple Silicon chip: the M4.
In an unprecedented move, the iPad Pro actually beat out the MacBook by using Apple’s latest in-house chip for the first time. While it’s not a direct replacement for pro-grade silicon like the M3 Ultra, the M4 coming first to the iPad Pro means it’s entirely possible that your next iPad will be more powerful than your current MacBook Air (or 14-inch MacBook Pro, for that matter). ).
All of this has major implications for Apple’s place in the ongoing big AI tech war , in which it has historically lagged.
What’s different about the Apple M4 chip?
The Apple M4 chip, as expected, is all about artificial intelligence. While M-series chips have always had a built-in neural engine (or NPU), the M4’s neural engine significantly improves efficiency. It still only has 16 cores, but Apple says it can now perform “38 trillion operations per second,” which is said to be sixty times the speed of the company’s first neural engine. By comparison, the M3 neural engine reached a maximum speed of 18 trillion operations per second.
“The neural engine in M4 is more powerful today than any neural engine in any AI PC,” said Tim Millett, vice president of Platform Architecture at Apple.
That’s a big claim for a chip that’s debuting in tablets, and it may not be true for a long time (more on that later). But the M4 also improves in more traditional ways: in addition to four performance cores, the M4 uses six efficiency cores, two more than the M3. Its 10-core GPU is virtually the same on paper as the M3, although Apple claims rendering performance is four times faster than the M2—many times more than what’s claimed for the M3 .
Apple also plans to continue to lead the industry in energy efficiency. “The M4 can deliver the same performance as the M2 using only half the power,” Millet said.
Rounding out these improvements is a new display engine designed primarily to support the iPad Pro’s OLED screen. This engine will provide a dynamic refresh rate of 10-120Hz for the device’s screen and will also help with brightness and color compensation. Brightness is a typical OLED pain point, and that’s what the iPad Pro is trying to fix with its new “tandem OLED” screen, which essentially puts two OLED displays on top of each other. The display engine will also help keep these screens in sync.
What does M4 mean for Apple AI?
All eyes are on Apple’s upcoming WWDC this June , where the company is expected to finally announce its AI competitors like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The M4 chip making its debut in the tablet only fuels these rumors.
With the launch of (and subsequent disappointment with) standalone AI devices like the Humane AI pin and Rabbit R1 , it’s clear that the market is hungry for AI implementations that go beyond novelty and actually integrate into your mobile operating system. Such an AI assistant could easily schedule appointments, change phone settings, send text messages, and more. Google is expected to be the first to take on such AI at Google I/O next week, but Apple’s mobile operating systems could well follow suit next month. It’s unclear what the Cupertino developer has in store for the iPhone, but when viewed in this light, it makes sense that the M4 would arrive on the iPad before the MacBook. Installing such a powerful neural engine in the iPad will ensure Apple’s tablets succeed in the next big mobile OS battleground.
Until WWDC, the neural engine in the M4 chip will continue to do what it’s always done – perform some fun tricks in Apple-developed programs. “It can do amazing things even faster,” Millet said. “For example, in Final Cut Pro, you can easily separate a subject from the background in a 4K video with just one tap.”
It’s impressive, but I’m looking forward to finally seeing this kind of power put to more robust uses. Until now, the M-series neural engine was considered promising because most of the artificial intelligence was moved to the cloud rather than running locally. The M4 prepares Apple for the next phase of on-device AI.
When will the M4 chip appear in MacBooks?
Apple’s M-series chips aren’t just for the iPad. Traditionally, they start with the MacBook later and then move to the company’s iPad. While Apple doesn’t tend to announce new MacBooks until the fall, the M4’s early debut lays the groundwork for what the next generation of MacBooks will look like.
First, I call it: Get ready for a MacBook with an OLED display. The arrival of OLED in MacBooks has been highly anticipated for many years , as it is already a mature technology when it comes to laptops. Since the M4 features a display specifically designed to support OLED, there’s no doubt that the next MacBook line will follow in the footsteps of the iPad Pro later this year.
OLED could even make its way to the MacBook Air, despite being reserved for the higher-end iPad model, as the MacBook Pro tends to rely less on the base M-series chip and more on pro-grade upgrades, which in this case would be the M4 Pro, M4 Ultra and M4 Max. The new MacBooks will also likely integrate with any mobile-focused AI initiatives Apple announces at WWDC. This would give the iPhone maker a quick way to carve out a niche for itself that Google and Microsoft can’t, since it makes both full-fledged computers (sorry, Chromebooks) and smartphones.
What about AI in Windows?
Even as Apple works to set the stage for its big AI reveal later this summer, it still has some catching up to do. Following Google I/O on May 14, Microsoft told the media that it would host a Surface AI event in Seattle on May 20. There, the company will share its “vision for artificial intelligence” focused on Windows on Arm.
Sources “familiar with Microsoft’s plans” told The Verge in April that the company is confident its new ARM-based Windows laptops will outperform the M3 MacBook Air in processor performance and artificial intelligence tasks. Even though the M4 chip has already been released, it poses a serious threat to Apple: Arm is the same architecture as Apple Silicon, and although it tends to lag behind Intel and AMD chips when it comes to power, it usually much more effective. If Microsoft can catch up to Apple’s battery life without sacrificing much power, it will deny the MacBook one of its few remaining hardware advantages over a much more diverse set of Windows PCs, especially since the M4 will be limited to tablets until the end of this fall.
It remains to be seen how much power we can expect from Microsoft’s new ARM Windows PCs, which are reportedly powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor.