Apple’s highest-end M3 Extremely chip is at the moment restricted to the Mac Studio, however a brand new leak has revealed that Apple examined the chip within the MacBook Professional as nicely.
In a put up in the present day on the Chinese language social media platform BiliBili, a person who we aren’t conversant in mentioned that they discovered code references to unreleased 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Professional fashions with the M3 Extremely chip, in an inner construct of iOS 18 working on an iPhone 16 engineering prototype. Particularly, they mentioned that they discovered J514d and J516d codenames in a file situated within the /AppleInternal/Diags/Checks/ folder.
J514 and J516 are the codenames for the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Professional fashions with M3 Professional and M3 Max chips, which had been launched by Apple in October 2023. Nevertheless, these specific codenames have a “d” suffix, which seemingly refers to an Extremely chip. For instance, the Mac Studio with the M3 Extremely is codenamed J575d.
Apple has by no means launched a MacBook Professional with an Extremely chip, so this can be a noteworthy discovery.
At present, the M3 Extremely is the quickest Mac chip that Apple has ever launched. It options as much as a 32-core CPU, as much as an 80-core GPU, and assist for as much as 512GB of unified reminiscence, so these may have been MacBook Professional specs in an alternate universe.
As an alternative, Apple up to date the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Professional fashions with M4, M4 Professional, and M4 Max chip choices in October final yr. Apple probably determined to not make the M3 Extremely chip out there within the MacBook Professional, probably resulting from larger thermal and battery life impacts for laptops in comparison with desktop computer systems.
With the M4 Max, the MacBook Professional might be configured with as much as a 16-core CPU, as much as a 40-core GPU, and as much as 128GB of unified reminiscence.
All in all, it seems that Apple a minimum of thought of MacBook Professional fashions with the M3 Extremely chip, however it’s unlikely that they are going to ever be launched.
