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.
A hypothetical M7 Ultra with LPDDR6 14.4Gbps memory would be 1.85 Tb/s.
You're look at about 100 tokens/s for a 1T MoE 37B active 4bit model.
It'd probably cost $30k or more I'm guessing if memory prices do not come down. Even at $30k, it could still be a relative bargain since an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96GB card costs $12k today. The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it. I expect an M7 Ultra to have 768GB or 1024GB.
Apple Silicon Macs were on their way to becoming cheap local LLM machines relative to professional GPUs before this memory crisis. It may still emerge as such in a few years.
Here's some interesting math: At 512GB, an Ultra chip could make 42 pro iPhones. Assume a 55% profit margins, and $1200 ASP, you're looking at $28,160 in profit from making iPhones instead. No wonder Apple discontinued the M3 Ultra 512GB. If they only have a limited supply of RAM for all their products, it makes no sense to produce an $8000 M3 Ultra 512GB when you can produce 42 pro iPhones. You can only configure an M3 Ultra up to 96GB today as of June 2026.
Apple would have to raise the price of a 512GB Ultra Mac to around $50k to match iPhone profits.
> Assume a 55% profit margins, and $1200 ASP, you're looking at $28,160 in profit from making iPhones instead. No wonder Apple discontinued the M3 Ultra 512GB.
How would that work? They purchase 512GB from Samsung and then it doesn't matter if that's like 128x 4GB or 4x 128GB?
Note that this reserved capacity now has competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, Chinese data centers and so on, all willing to pay premium.
If comapnies keep spending half a macbook neo worth of subscription on AI plans monthly per person, Apple is going to have a hard time competing.
Well yeah but NVidia just released a contender to their silicon and the M6 is probably already set in stone. Best to reshift resources to a great M7 than having a mediocre M6 and M7.
(This is assuming Apple will deliver, but this area is one of the biggest ones they have in AI, and they need the developer ecosystem to exist and survive)
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.
Do we have any explanations of what WLCM means that are more industry focused? That explanation of the DRAM being on the same wafer doesn't really make sense. For one, at that point there's no "multi chip" part if you're integrating more onto the same die rather than less.
And their explanation isn't really passing the smell test for me for other reasons, for instance the fact that DRAM processes are pretty radically different than bulk logic processes, which wouldn't really let you put it all on the same wafer, much less the same die. Even back in the day when you had eDRAM blocks (like the Xbox 360's eDRAM die), that was really a DRAM process with a bit of logic cells that wouldn't be competitive if they weren't sitting right next to the DRAM blocks.
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.
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.
What it's saying is that the M6 will be released, but not the M6 Pro or M6 Max. Instead, Apple will wait to release new Max/Pro chips for a future generation.
It's not simply marketing since the Pro/Max chips of a generation use the same cores as the regular version, just more of them or different combinations of performance and efficiency cores.
> Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released.
The claim is that M6 will be released, but the only variants will be lower end.
When they get to the M7 generation, they will make high end variants.
It's a real distinction because each generation of parts shares an architecture.
The article has an entire section speculating what the M6 parts will be, but says they'll top out around 200GB/s memory bandwidth and 12 graphics cores.
> Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released.
Why would it? Each generation of the M series has an architectural improvement on their chipsets. The difference between an M1 and an M1 Pro is the allocation and arrangement not the architecture. M6 to M7 presumably will have architectural changes.
This is no different than them skipping the “Ultra” chips on some generations. The only real difference is it going all the way down to skipping the “Pro” line. So, only the MacBook Air, low end MBP, and maybe the iPad Pro and Mac Mini get the M6.
Whether it matters for the consumer (who only sees released and announced end results) or not is irrelevant.
It can still be a very real, not made-up distinction, if the actual facts on the ground are that Apple designed an M6 line, but then scrapped that design and asked the team to create a new design with emphasis on AI-focused specs.
It's not the name that's important (the M7 could still come out as M6), is them skipping a design, or cpu "Tick-Tock model" step.
Made up how? They'll do a refresh of lower end devices, but not the high core count versions.
It's the same thing as how the Mac Studio got an M4 Max refresh, but they didn't make an M4 Ultra so if you want the 28+ core CPU or 60+ core GPU, that's still using an M3 Ultra.
This time it'll be across all the Pro, Max, and Ultra versions, if you want those they'll stay at the previous generation for the M6 cycle.
Not that weird - Apple has a huge set of chips and hardware and software products. Putting every single thing on a fixed identical update cycle together won't always make sense.
Except that is not what's happening. The article clarifies something that is misleading if you interpret the headline in isolation: "high-end M6" means "the high-end variants of the M6 line", not "the entire M6 line".
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.
Isn't that switch basically a downgrade? You get some more single core performance and some weight savings, but also a worse (and smaller) screen, less multicore performance, less GPU performance, less video encoding performance and a smaller battery? I'm on an M2 Max myself, and glad they introduced a larger form factor Air, but it seems like a long way from an upgrade.
The optics and marketing is already fucked, the MBP goes to M5 Max, the Mini has the M4, the Studio has M2 or M3, the iMac apparently has two different kinds of M4s, it's all fucked.
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.
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.
Same, have a very old MBP. Not sure what to do because I don’t want to wait a year and a half. That coupled with today’s price increases make it a tougher decision.
I agree. It was very annoying to me to spend the money (and on the nano matte one too) and still have that stupid notch. But it never makes any difference at all which is good news.
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.
RAM is a commodity and nvidia will be paying the same prices. The used market will reflect the cost of RAM. nvidia owns the top of the market but many of us don't need that.
I would prefer a Studio if it does a decent enough job even if throttles a bit under load, way less power usage and noise than those GPUs plus the PC you need to put those in.
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.
A hypothetical M7 Ultra with LPDDR6 14.4Gbps memory would be 1.85 Tb/s.
You're look at about 100 tokens/s for a 1T MoE 37B active 4bit model.
It'd probably cost $30k or more I'm guessing if memory prices do not come down. Even at $30k, it could still be a relative bargain since an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96GB card costs $12k today. The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it. I expect an M7 Ultra to have 768GB or 1024GB.
Apple Silicon Macs were on their way to becoming cheap local LLM machines relative to professional GPUs before this memory crisis. It may still emerge as such in a few years.
Here's some interesting math: At 512GB, an Ultra chip could make 42 pro iPhones. Assume a 55% profit margins, and $1200 ASP, you're looking at $28,160 in profit from making iPhones instead. No wonder Apple discontinued the M3 Ultra 512GB. If they only have a limited supply of RAM for all their products, it makes no sense to produce an $8000 M3 Ultra 512GB when you can produce 42 pro iPhones. You can only configure an M3 Ultra up to 96GB today as of June 2026.
Apple would have to raise the price of a 512GB Ultra Mac to around $50k to match iPhone profits.
> Assume a 55% profit margins, and $1200 ASP, you're looking at $28,160 in profit from making iPhones instead. No wonder Apple discontinued the M3 Ultra 512GB.
How would that work? They purchase 512GB from Samsung and then it doesn't matter if that's like 128x 4GB or 4x 128GB?
It's likely the capacity they have reserved can be in different combinations.
Note that this reserved capacity now has competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, Chinese data centers and so on, all willing to pay premium.
If comapnies keep spending half a macbook neo worth of subscription on AI plans monthly per person, Apple is going to have a hard time competing.
I’d assume by next year the open weights models will be outlawed the way things are going nowadays :/
An ‘ypothetical!
Problem is affording the ram…
As some like to call it, 'the last moat'.
late 2027 is a very long time.
Well yeah but NVidia just released a contender to their silicon and the M6 is probably already set in stone. Best to reshift resources to a great M7 than having a mediocre M6 and M7.
(This is assuming Apple will deliver, but this area is one of the biggest ones they have in AI, and they need the developer ecosystem to exist and survive)
That would cost as much as a new car.
Don't worry, they'll just make cars more expensive
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.
Do we have any explanations of what WLCM means that are more industry focused? That explanation of the DRAM being on the same wafer doesn't really make sense. For one, at that point there's no "multi chip" part if you're integrating more onto the same die rather than less.
And their explanation isn't really passing the smell test for me for other reasons, for instance the fact that DRAM processes are pretty radically different than bulk logic processes, which wouldn't really let you put it all on the same wafer, much less the same die. Even back in the day when you had eDRAM blocks (like the Xbox 360's eDRAM die), that was really a DRAM process with a bit of logic cells that wouldn't be competitive if they weren't sitting right next to the DRAM blocks.
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.
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.
What it's saying is that the M6 will be released, but not the M6 Pro or M6 Max. Instead, Apple will wait to release new Max/Pro chips for a future generation.
It's not simply marketing since the Pro/Max chips of a generation use the same cores as the regular version, just more of them or different combinations of performance and efficiency cores.
> Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released.
The claim is that M6 will be released, but the only variants will be lower end.
When they get to the M7 generation, they will make high end variants.
It's a real distinction because each generation of parts shares an architecture.
The article has an entire section speculating what the M6 parts will be, but says they'll top out around 200GB/s memory bandwidth and 12 graphics cores.
> Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released.
Why would it? Each generation of the M series has an architectural improvement on their chipsets. The difference between an M1 and an M1 Pro is the allocation and arrangement not the architecture. M6 to M7 presumably will have architectural changes.
Is the point that M6 doesn't exist? What change are they making that justifies M5 to M7?
Or did this announcement also add an M6 chip, and they're just skipping pro?
This is no different than them skipping the “Ultra” chips on some generations. The only real difference is it going all the way down to skipping the “Pro” line. So, only the MacBook Air, low end MBP, and maybe the iPad Pro and Mac Mini get the M6.
The article says the 2nd.
Whether it matters for the consumer (who only sees released and announced end results) or not is irrelevant.
It can still be a very real, not made-up distinction, if the actual facts on the ground are that Apple designed an M6 line, but then scrapped that design and asked the team to create a new design with emphasis on AI-focused specs.
It's not the name that's important (the M7 could still come out as M6), is them skipping a design, or cpu "Tick-Tock model" step.
Made up how? They'll do a refresh of lower end devices, but not the high core count versions.
It's the same thing as how the Mac Studio got an M4 Max refresh, but they didn't make an M4 Ultra so if you want the 28+ core CPU or 60+ core GPU, that's still using an M3 Ultra.
This time it'll be across all the Pro, Max, and Ultra versions, if you want those they'll stay at the previous generation for the M6 cycle.
Not that weird - Apple has a huge set of chips and hardware and software products. Putting every single thing on a fixed identical update cycle together won't always make sense.
Made up: “this one goes to 11”
Except that is not what's happening. The article clarifies something that is misleading if you interpret the headline in isolation: "high-end M6" means "the high-end variants of the M6 line", not "the entire M6 line".
Why? The specs and benchmarks will show the differences, there’s no marketing around that.
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.
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.
Isn't that switch basically a downgrade? You get some more single core performance and some weight savings, but also a worse (and smaller) screen, less multicore performance, less GPU performance, less video encoding performance and a smaller battery? I'm on an M2 Max myself, and glad they introduced a larger form factor Air, but it seems like a long way from an upgrade.
It seems likely the MB Ultra will ship with the M5 Ultra.
> This means there won't be a redesigned MBP this year since there won't be M6 Pro/Max chips.
They can release a redesigned MBP with the base M6 chip.
They can, it wouldn't make sense from a marketing and optics perspective.
They don't want to tell the world how the new redesigned MBP is the best laptop in the world but it's slower than the older MBPs.
The optics and marketing is already fucked, the MBP goes to M5 Max, the Mini has the M4, the Studio has M2 or M3, the iMac apparently has two different kinds of M4s, it's all fucked.
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.
my 2 cents is that a new tech node is harder to produce variants on. it's easier to make new flavors of a mature tech node
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.
There's already reporting that M7 will be on Intel 18A - Apple's giving Nvidia and Broadcom and others more TSMC capacity back.
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.
Same, have a very old MBP. Not sure what to do because I don’t want to wait a year and a half. That coupled with today’s price increases make it a tougher decision.
You can turn off the notch, I mean crop it out at least.
The notch does not matter at all, you will forget it's there.
I agree. It was very annoying to me to spend the money (and on the nano matte one too) and still have that stupid notch. But it never makes any difference at all which is good news.
I was surprised to even see it mentioned after all these years, literally haven’t thought about it a single time since I got my first MBP that had it.
How about we release M5 Ultra first?
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.
Bro just give me a new iPhone mini
You will have a massive phone and you will be happy.
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-...
Thanks for catching that - unfortunately I can't edit the submission URL, but I've emailed hn@ycombinator.com to see if the mods can fix it.
EDIT: gift link if paywalled (archive.is capture is truncated): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/apple-to-...
Fixed now. Thanks to you both!
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.
RAM is a commodity and nvidia will be paying the same prices. The used market will reflect the cost of RAM. nvidia owns the top of the market but many of us don't need that.
And 6090 will have 48GB of RAM compared to something like an M7 Max that might have 192GB or an M7 Ultra that might have 768GB.
I would prefer a Studio if it does a decent enough job even if throttles a bit under load, way less power usage and noise than those GPUs plus the PC you need to put those in.
This a significant misunderstanding of which party it is Apple wants to attend.
same people who bought all mac mini for ai?
Theyve dropped the ball bigtime.