The Macbook Pro is undoubtedly the most powerful Apple laptop. This is due to its sophisticated design and, above all, to the chips developed by the company itself, which offer spectacular performance and redefine the limits of what we expect from a laptop. Along these lines, a recent filtration arrives that reveals one of the most surprised decisions than those of Cupertino have taken in recent times.
According to information appeared in Bilibili, the Chinese Social Network, and shared by a user who claims to have accessed an internal version of iOS 18 in an iPhone 16 prototype, Apple was testing MacBook Pro With the almighty chip m3 ultra. Yes, the same one that is currently only in the Mac Studio and that represents the top in gross power within the Apple Silicon chip range.
MacBook Pro with Ultra Chip, is it a reality?
This information is based on the appearance of two names unknown until now: J514D and J516D. These codes appeared within the internal directory of the system, on the route/Appleinternal/Diags/Tests/, which could indicate that Apple was performing real internal tests. These codes would be variants of the already known J514 and J516, which correspond to the MacBook Pro of 14 and 16 inches with M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, launched in October 2023. The difference is the suffix “D”, which in other products such as the Mac Studio with Ultra chip (J575D) has been used precisely to distinguish configurations with the most advanced chip.
If we had launched, we would be talking about the most powerful laptop ever created by Apple. The Ultra M3 has up to 32 CPU nuclei, a GPU of up to 80 nuclei and support for up to up to 512 GB of RAM. It is a desktop chip designed for extreme work loads, as an 8K video edition in real time, complex 3D simulations or artificial intelligence functions. Seeing it in a Macbook Pro would have marked a before and after as far as professional laptops is concerned.
But it did not materialize. Apple decided to step back and, instead, chose to update the MacBook Pro with the New M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips in October last year. Although the M4 Max already offers impressive performance, with up to 16 CPU nuclei, 40 GPU and 128 GB of RAM, the difference with the Ultra M3 remains remarkable, especially for the most demanding users in the professional sector.
The reason behind this decision could be related to the physical limitations of a laptop. Integrating the ultra M3 into a Macbook Pro would have resulted in temperature problems and in a too important consumption of the battery. Energy consumption and heat generation of this chip are much greater than those of the M3 Max or M4 Max, something difficult to handle in a chassis as thin as that of the MacBook Pro.
In any case, the filtration invites us to dream of a future where that line that separates desktop computers and professional laptops becomes increasingly diffuse. If the future generations of Apple Silicon manage MacBook Pro with ultra chip as a real option in one or two years.
