Apple’s WWDC Plans Ignore A New MacBook Pro

Next week’s Worldwide Developer Conference will be one of the most consequential for Apple in many years. Still, those hoping Apple delivers its latest M4 chipset to the MacBook Pro and Mac platform will be disappointed.

Tim Cook will take to the stage to introduce Apple’s vision for AI on mobile technology, focusing on the upcoming AI additions to iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. These will be measured against Android’s AI offers from the likes of Google with the Pixel family and Samsung’s Galaxy AI; given Apple’s AI will not be publicly available until October, these platforms will have had nearly a year to define what mobile AI should look like.

It’s understandable that Apple would spend time laying out these plans at a developer conference, but hardware has proven to be a solid “second line” of interest at many WWDC events during the years. This year has an obvious gap in the portfolio, namely the latest Apple Silicon chipset in the M4.

Launched in May 2024, the M4 chipset offers around 20% more CPU performance, 13% GPU performance, and, crucially, an NPU that offers more than double the number of operations per second over the M3 chipset. The NPU improvements will be the key part of the silicon to use for AI, which makes the lack of any new M4-powered Mac (be it the entry-level MacBook Air or the Mac Studio or Mac Pro) all the more disappointing.

With no new hardware launching at WWDC 2024, the only Apple product with the latest M4 technology is the iPad Pro. There’s a world of difference between a powerful workstation-level laptop and Apple’s closed shop of software and hardware on the iPad.

We’ll hear about Apple’s push to integrate AI, how it will become vital for those using Apple software, and how developers can use these tools to create new experiences. It’s just that the hardware needed to make the best use of macOS developer betas to prepare software for the public launch of the next version of macOS won’t be available.

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