Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

"Death knell" is a touch hyperbolic. Hardware that can only run quantized models that take up GBs in VRAM falls short of even an A100 (by almost an order of magnitude[0]), which in turn falls short of what an 8xH100 cluster can do (also by another order of magnitude[0]).

I'm an avid believer in local LLMs, but I cannot deceive myself - data center accelerators will win on power dissipation numbers alone[1], even when giving generous allowances for higher efficiency on Apple chips - and assuming the Apple-efficiency advantage persists on the same TSMC process node.

0. Based on my unscientific fine-tuning training experiments across local and rented GPUs. YMMV for inference.

1. Unless Apple surprises everyone and brings back the XServe with M7, if not, then laptop and desktop for factors simply can't dump heat fast enough to compete head-to-head, and will be designed for lower input wattage.

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.

So I think Apple has the right instinct. In fact, I've had the thought multiple times that I really want a lot of workflows just running on my device. Workflows like fast vector search (already fast on the m4, but I want it more common place), or realtime transcription and summarization to be even faster, on device, etc.

there isn't a future where we all just decide that nah, we don't want AI anymore. usefuly things don't disappear.

I think reducing the die area dedicated to ai stuff is not going to be a problem.

And in fairness apple already has essentially ai-less hardware in the form of the MacBook neo and it’s been an astonishing success.

I have one and it’s a very good laptop, particularly for the price i paid it.

Do we have a choice? It's being forced upon us by folks who have the power to distort any market they want. Energy prices are rising, and the PC industry is about to be destroyed by component prices. It will be dumb clients that run the software our feudal overlords of the data centers will have the grace to grant us. And the government lets it happen because it furthers their interests.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you thinking Apple is leaking that there will be a long wait for much more expensive chips in order to… what?

They can release a redesigned MBP with the base M6 chip.

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.

I could be wrong here though, my examples are more than a bit long in the tooth.

As someone who wants to run effective llms locally for many things their other big benefit has been the unified memory studios for a small bit.

They don't need to pull out of this approach.

EDIT: gift link if paywalled (archive.is capture is truncated): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/apple-to-...