Toni Hobrecht
Apple is struggling to reduce its reliance on third-party suppliers by moving component manufacturing in-house. As with the A-series mobile chipsets and M-series processors in the Apple MacBook, rumors have it that Wi-Fi chips, 5G modems, and even display production for the iPhones, Apple Watches, and Macs also come back home.
Apple iPhone 14 Pro / Apple Watch Ultra
At least as far as the Wi-Fi chips are concerned, this development has just been dampened. According to a report by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple prefers to rely on its main supplier Broadcom instead of developing its own components. The corresponding IC design resources go into chipset development. Kuo also stated that Apple still prioritizes 5G modem development over the Wi-Fi chip project.
Apple is likely to move to Wi-Fi 6E in its upcoming iPhone 15 models and the rest of the product portfolio. Kuo also confirmed that the new processor will be a combined Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth chip. Bloomberg editor Mark Gurman also previously confirmed that Apple is still working on the Wi-Fi + Bluetooth combo chip.
Apple MacBook Pro 14 M2, 16 M2 and Mac mini available
The new Apple MacBook Pro 14 and 16 inch models with the M2 processors started to ship. In the first wave of availability, 27 countries and regions will be supplied. Powered by Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max chipsets, the new Mac mini with an M2 or M2 Pro processor is also available for sale now. The first pre-orderers have already received their new Macs, for all other buyers Apple gives an estimated delivery time of 1 working day for India, Germany and the USA.
The Apple M2 Pro chipset is based on a second-generation 5 Nm node and has 40 billion transistors, 20% more than the M1 Pro. The new processors also support up to 32GB of unified memory with 200GB/s bandwidth. The M2 Pro has 10 or 12 CPU cores – 6 or 8 high-performance cores plus 4 efficiency cores – and up to 19 GPU cores.
The Apple M2 Max has a whopping 67 billion transistors, three times as many as the base M2. It also supports up to 96GB of RAM at 400GB/s, twice as fast as the M2 Pro and four times more than the regular M2. The CPU is the same as the 12 core version of the M2 Pro. The GPU is twice as big with up to 38 cores, the L2 cache is even bigger.
