The Apple M3 series of chips debuted late last year in the MacBook Pro series and more recently in the MacBook Air M3, and as impressive as the M3 series is, there is no doubt that people are looking forward to the next one. The good news is that the M4 chip may be ready by this time next year.

A new "estimated roadmap" from market analysis firm Canalys (via TechRadar) suggests that the Apple M4 chip could be available in Q1 2025. This is not a guarantee of Apple's plans, but is an estimate made to show various companies what their competitors (in this case Apple, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm) are up to.

In the past, Apple has typically spaced new generations of M-series chips by about 18 months. Therefore, a late Q1 to early Q2 2025 release would be quite consistent with that. Apple is not the kind of person who releases new products on someone else's schedule.

Canalys also predicts that the M4 chip will be heavily focused on AI, which is not a big surprise; AI PCs are currently very much in the spotlight, and there has been a growing push over the past few years to offer better, more powerful AI-enabled chips. Indeed, Apple is said to be doing just that with its iPhone 16 and A18 chipsets, both rumored to offer significantly improved neural engines.

Apple also made a big push for AI with the MacBook Air M3, which features an enhanced neural engine. Apple even declared it "the world's best consumer laptop for AI". In other words, the M4 is guaranteed to offer even more AI features and performance.

Perhaps we can also expect more hardware upgrades with the M4 chip: the M3 performance core is 30% faster than the M1, and the efficiency core is 50% faster. Not to mention graphics performance (hardware-accelerated ray tracing is now on the M3) and power efficiency, for which Apple silicon has been known since its inception.

However, it is hard to say at this point how much the M4 chip will improve performance and power efficiency. However, if the iPhone 16 rumors are solid, Apple may push for more on-device processing rather than relegating AI processing to the cloud. We will have to wait and see what additional information pops up over the next 12 months.