Apple’s M3 nightmare is coming to an end

The new M4 MacBook Air is coming “relatively soon” and for Apple, it may not be soon enough. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the current M3 MacBook Air–it’s Apple’s best laptop. It offers a great combination of performance, portability, and price for the customer.

The issue is with the M3 chip itself–again, there’s nothing wrong with it from a user standpoint. But behind the scenes, the M3 caused problems with Apple’s Mac lineup, which is why the M3 was the shortest cycle of the M-series chips.

It’s expensive to produce

The M3 was a 3nm chip. “3nm” refers to the fabrication process to create the chips; it doesn’t define a chip’s physical size, it’s a general term used to refer to a chip’s transistor density, speed, and power efficiency. TSMC, which manufactures Apple’s chips, referred to the initial 3nm process as N3B, which had its issues. It was costly, and yields (the number of viable chips in a semiconductor production wafer) were lower than those of previous processes.

That’s not ideal for Apple, a company that does everything it can to maintain its profit margins. When it was released, the M3 MacBook Air was priced the same as the M2 MacBook Air, so the company took a hit on its margin. Since then, TSMC has implemented its N3E fabrication process, which improved upon N3B by cutting costs and producing higher yields. N3E, which is referred to as an enhanced 3nm process, is used to make Apple’s M4 chips, which means the M4 MacBook Air should be cheaper to make—which Apple will surely appreciate.

Skipping a beat

The M3’s cost and yield issues most certainly came into play when Apple decided how to implement the chip throughout its products. For example, the release of the iPad Pro in May 2024 wasn’t a surprise, but its M4 chip was. The previous iPad Pro had an M2, and the M3 chip made its debut in the MacBook Air just a couple of months earlier, so it was easy to conclude the that M3 would succeed the M2 in the iPad Pro. Apple also upgraded the iMac to an M4 after just 12 months, quicker than its usual cadence.

The M4 iPad Pro serves as proof that Apple wanted to move off the M3 as soon as possible and move to a chip that has a better production value. The M3 issue was so pressing that the company was willing to disrupt its pattern of introducing new M-series chips in the MacBook Pro–likely a one-time hiccup that the company was willing to accept. Making the iPad Pro the first M4 product also allows TSMC to ramp up production of the chip at a moderate pace–demand for iPads isn’t as high as for MacBooks.

With the release of the first M5 Macs later this year, Apple will be back on track. The M5 is a 3nm chip but will be made using a new N3P process that TSMC started testing last year.

Apple’s remaining updates

Apple still uses the M2 chip in the iPad Air and the Apple Vision Pro. The iPad Air is reportedly going to be updated soon with an M4 chip–another product that skips the M3. The Vision Pro is skipping both the M3 and M4, going with an M5 upgrade that may not happen until late this year or in 2026. The Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro also all skipped the M3 entirely.

The M2 chip is also used in Apple’s cheapest laptop, the $999 M2 MacBook Air. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman brought up this particular laptop in his recent report on Apple’s 2025 release schedule, and it appears that Apple will still offer this model for another year rather than moving to the similar M3 model. Apple moved the $999 model from the M1 to the M2, but like everything else, the M3 is chip non grata.

The M2 is an enhanced 5nm chip, and since that chip is still going to be used in the Vision Pro, Apple the M2 MacBook Air justifies the M2 chip’s production. This also means that the $999 MacBook Air won’t get upgraded until the M4 MacBook Air gets its chip upgrade to the M5 in 2026. At that time, Apple would discontinue the M2 model and move the base M4 MacBook Air to the $999 price point.

What about the A17 Pro?

The A17 Pro in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max was actually Apple’s first 3nm chip; it was released a month before the M3. The A-series and M-series chips are basically the same, with the A chips used in the iPhone and low-end iPads, and the M chips in Macs and high-end iPads.

Like the M3, the A17 Pro is made using TSMC’s N3E process. The current iPad mini has an A17 Pro and the upcoming 11th-gen iPad is rumored to get the same chip. If the A17 Pro is made with the same N3E process, where are the chips for these new products coming from, if Apple is moving away from N3E?

That’s where chip binning comes into play. Remember those low yields during the N3E process? Binning is where those “rejected” chips are taken and made useful by disabling processing cores, slowing down speeds, and other methods. Apple is likely using binned A17 Pros for these products. For example, the iPad mini’s A17 Pro has a 5-core GPU, which is a binned version of the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro that had a 6-core GPU.

Binned chips are perfectly good chips, so there’s no need to worry about performance. Also, it puts them to use instead of wasting them in the trash or figuring out a way to recycle them. These binned chips will be the last remnants of a chip cycle Apple is eager to move on from–and users benefit with better performance and power efficiency from the newer processes. So expect the iPad mini and 11th-gen iPad to get updates sooner than later as Apple puts the whole M3 nightmare behind it for good.