A recent post on the Korean Naver blog by news aggregator account “yeux1122” claims that the upcoming 15-inch MacBook Air will feature an M2 chip instead of the M3 chip that many had speculated earlier. According to the blog’s unnamed source from the Taiwanese supply chain, the reason for this change was not due to production problems at chipmaker TSMC, but was rather a result of various factors such as market conditions and inventory adjustments.
Earlier this month, a report from Korea suggested that Apple had temporarily stopped production of its M2 chips due to a decrease in global demand for MacBooks. While production of the M2 chip resumed in February, it was reportedly only at half the level of the previous year. The report did not specify why Apple temporarily halted production, but the new information from the Taiwanese supply chain source suggests that the decision to use the M2 chip in the 15-inch MacBook Air was not due to production issues at TSMC, but rather due to market conditions and inventory adjustments.
Recently, an unreleased 15-inch MacBook Air with a processor similar to the M2 chip was discovered in the developer logs of the App Store. The MacBook Air has an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU, similar to the M2 chip, along with 8 GB of RAM. Further, its display resolution too is the same as that of the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The release date for the 15-inch MacBook Air is not yet known, but it is expected to be announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) starting on June 5th. Apple announced the existing 13-inch MacBook Air with the M2 chip at last year’s WWDC and launched it in July 2022.
It is anticipated that the release of a Mac powered by the M3 chip will happen at a later date and signal a shift to a 3-nanometer production process from the current 5-nanometer standard. The 3nm process, which is also used in this year’s iPhone 15 series, offers improved performance and greater efficiency.
