Apple will skip the M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra chips entirely, moving straight to a base M6 before accelerating development of the next-generation M7 family, according to Bloomberg reporting.
This fall’s redesigned MacBook Pro models will ship with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips rather than newer M6 variants, alongside a separate base-model MacBook Pro carrying the plain M6 chip in the current design.
The decision comes down to one priority: artificial intelligence. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple had planned major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 family and decided those improvements mattered enough to skip ahead, rather than finishing out the full M6 lineup first.
The M7 Ultra chip is expected to carry the biggest jump, with Gurman writing that it “dramatically upgrades AI performance,” pushing Apple’s silicon closer to dedicated AI accelerators such as Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. Apple’s advantage in running AI models directly on-device has largely come from its unified memory architecture, which gives models access to far more memory than a typical discrete GPU setup.
Historically, Apple has used the same size neural engine across an entire chip generation, apart from the Ultra variant. Reporting suggests that could change with M7, with neural engine size scaling by chip tier for the first time.
The first Mac expected to carry an M7 chip is a redesigned base-model 14-inch MacBook Pro, targeted for early 2027. An M7 Pro and Max update for the larger 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models would follow later in the year. The M7 Ultra chip is separately rumored to support up to 1.5TB of RAM, matching a specification last seen on the 2019 Mac Pro.
Apple has not commented publicly on the chip roadmap.
The strategy mirrors a pattern already playing out across the chip industry, where AI-focused neural processing has become a bigger competitive battleground than raw CPU or GPU speed. Qualcomm, Intel and AMD have each pushed neural processing unit upgrades into recent laptop chips for the same reason.
