Recent rumors have suggested that Apple will release its first M3 MacBooks this year. However, a new five-year global notebook shipments forecast published by DigiTimes has suggested we won’t be seeing them until 2024.
Said MacBooks will likely be based on TSMC’s 3nm fabrication process and are expected to see healthy sales driven by not just an improved chip but also the easing of inflation. The report forecasts a 4.7% growth following a two-year decline in the notebook market. According to the report,
“In 2023, the share of notebooks built using Arm-based processors will likely decrease rather than increase because Apple, which adopts in-house designed Arm-based CPUs for most of its notebook lineups, is expected to experience a significant decline in shipments in 2023 as the US brand vendor plans to transit to CPUs built by a 3nm node at TSMC for performance upgrading in 2024.”
In July, Mark Gurman predicted the launch of the first M3 Macs in October. He further predicted that the products featuring the new chip would most likely be the iMac, 13-inch MacBook Air, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro. This prediction is based on the fact that we saw the release of the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models in January, and the 15-inch MacBook Air, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro models in June.
However, in September, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that it doesn’t look like Apple will release the M3 MacBooks until the end of this year. Though Kuo only mentioned MacBooks, it is still a possibility that a new iMac could come out before 2023 ends, especially considering the fact that it has been over two and a half years since its last version was released.
The M3 chip is expected to offer power efficiency improvements over the current 5nm-based M2 chip that came out in June 2022. It is also said to feature a new GPU with hardware ray-tracing that is also seen on the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro chip.