The MacBook Pro M3 is one of the best laptops you can buy today, but that doesn't mean Apple is sitting still. In fact, the company has already begun work on a follow-up model that could be available by the end of the year.

During a Q&A session on the previously rumored Apple Car, Bloomberg's Mark Garman obtained some interesting information on Apple's silicon. According to Garman, Apple has "just begun formal development" of a new MacBook Pro with an M4 chip. If the company is starting development now, that means the product could be announced at the end of this year or early 2025. [The original M1 was introduced in November 2020, the M2 at WWDC in June 2022, and the latest M3 in October 2023. Therefore, it seems likely that the M4 will debut early next year, but it is certainly possible that it will be released in late 2024.

We already know that Apple's chip manufacturing partner TSMC expects to move to a 2nm process in 2025, and that both Apple and Intel are first in line to receive it. However, if Cupertino has already begun development of the M4, the next real leap in chip architecture is slated for the M5, which will likely remain a 3nm process.

That does not mean that the M4 is somehow inferior. Details are scarce at this time, but if a 2nm processor node shrink means a 30% jump in performance, there is still plenty of room for performance gains and power efficiency in the current build.

A Taiwan Economic Daily report last month claimed that Apple's M4 chip will feature "significantly" more cores as part of an upgraded neural engine focused on AI and machine learning tasks. This also coincides with plans to increase the amount of generative AI used in iOS 18 on the iPhone 16; most MacBook models have a 16-core Neural Engine (the Mac Studio and Mac Pro have a 32-core Neural Engine).

We know very little about the M4 chip at this point, as this is almost the first information we have on it. However, we will almost certainly begin to get more information in time for WWDC 2024 in June. Until then, here is our comprehensive review of the MacBook Air 15-inch M3.