Apple announced the M3 Ultra chip alongside the new Mac Studio earlier this year and it is currently the fastest Apple Silicon chip to have ever existed. According to a new iOS 18 leak, the company tested the M3 Ultra chip in the MacBook Pro as well, but is it an indication that the ‘Ultra’ branded chips will be coming to the MacBooks?
Apple used its most powerful M3 Ultra chip in the new MacBook Pro models, but it did not see daylight
A user posted on the Chinese social media platform BiliBili that they found references to unreleased variants of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models running on Apple’s latest M3 Ultra chip. The references were discovered in an internal build of iOS 18 running on iPhone 16 engineering prototype. The source mentions that the codenames J514d and J516d were located in the /AppleInternal/Diags/Tests/ folder.
Both of these codenames belong to Apple’s 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with the M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, which were introduced by the end of last year. The “d” suffix, on the flip side, reflect the company’s Ultra chip branding and it can be observed in the Mac Studio’s codename which is J575d. The news is quite peculiar as the company has always reserved the Ultra chip for the Mac Studio or the Mac Pro, but never on any other Mac. While it is quite strange, it also brings us to question if the company was considering launching an all new variant of the MacBook Pro with an even powerful M3 Ultra chip.
The M3 Ultra is Apple’s most capable chip to date and it is only available on the Mac Studio. It comes with up to a 32-core CPU and a whopping 80-core GPU coupled with a 512GB of unified memory. These specifications on the MacBook Pro would have made it a very capable machine, but keeping all other factors constant, including the battery life. More importantly, the thermal management solution on the new MacBook Pro, though capable, could have been a bit inferior to keep the chip cool to maintain higher performance levels without throttling.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro models are available in the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max configurations with a maximum of 128GB of unified memory. While the idea is solid for productivity and usage as a whole, it is unlikely that the company will ever release a MacBook with an ‘Ultra’ chip.
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