Deciding when to buy a Mac is about to get a lot easier

Macworld

When Apple released the M4 iPad Pro last May, it threw an already uncertain schedule into upheaval. Half of Apple’s Mac lineup was still running M2 chips, and Apple had only just updated the MacBook Air to an M3 just two months prior.

For the first time ever, an iPad had a faster chip than the entire Mac range. It would be another six months before the first Mac received an M4 chip, and two months into 2025, two M2 models, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, are still using 2023 chips, the MacBook Air has an M3, and three have M4s (the Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro). Buying a Mac right now requires intimate knowledge of spec sheets, timelines, and rumors, lest you get a model that’s essentially obsolete before you walk out of the Apple Store.

But it looks like that’s about to change. According to Mark Bloomberg’s latest Power On newsletter, Apple will update the MacBook Air with an M4 chip in a few weeks, followed closely by the Mac Studio and Mac Pro with the M4 Ultra. That will bring the whole Mac lineup up to date with the latest generation of chips, and prepare the ground for the transition to the M5.

It will also mark the first time since the Apple silicon transition arrived that every Mac is running a version of the same chip. The Mac Pro skipped the M1; the iMac skipped the M2; the Mac Studio, Mac mini, and Mac Pro skipped the M3. But apparently, the fourth time’s the charm for Apple silicon.

Gurman reports that, unlike the M4, the M5 transition will begin with the Mac rather than the iPad Pro: “And once those are released, the M5 chip transition will begin—alongside new MacBook Pro models in the fall. Then we should get an M5 iPad Pro by the first half of 2026. In other words, the M4 and M5 chip transitions will see their release orders flipped, with the M5 coming to the Mac before the iPad Pro.”

By debuting the M5 in the Mac, Apple is setting up an annual cadence that could look something like this:

November: MacBook Pro/Mac mini

March: MacBook Air/iMac

June: Mac Studio/Mac Pro

Not every model needs to be updated every year, but establishing a proper timeline for Mac updates and expectations for releases will make choosing when to buy a Mac much easier for consumers. The Mac is the only product that doesn’t have a clear identifier to let people know what generation it is, so a schedule will help give the lines some much-needed predictability.