Apple Rewires Chip Roadmap Around AI: M7 Ultra Targets 1.5TB, Eyes NVIDIA Blackwell

Apple.com

In Sunday’s Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple is engineering the M7 Ultra to support as much as 1.5 terabytes of unified memory — roughly double the ceiling planned for the upcoming M5 Ultra — and that the company wants the chip to approach the performance class of dedicated AI accelerators like NVIDIA’s Blackwell architecture. That goal has shaped a decision with no precedent in the Apple Silicon era: Apple is canceling the M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra entirely, jumping straight to M7 in an effort to ship a generational leap in AI performance rather than an incremental refinement.

The 1.5 TB figure, if it ships, would erase the last meaningful memory capacity advantage the 2019 Intel Mac Pro held over Apple Silicon — a gap that has persisted across six years and four M-series chip generations. Whether it actually ships is genuinely uncertain: the same global DRAM shortage that forced Apple to raise MacBook Pro prices by $300 on June 25 and pull 512 GB Mac Studio configurations from sale has also made the memory components the M7 Ultra would require harder to source and more expensive to include. SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung told Reuters on July 10 that 2027 will be “the worst year in the industry’s history from the supply perspective” — a forecast that lands squarely over the period when Apple’s engineers will need to finalize what the M7 Ultra actually ships with.

What every Mac buyer needs to know right now: the M6 Pro and M6 Max that many professionals were waiting for are not delayed — they are canceled. Anyone considering a high-end Mac upgrade faces a clearly defined window. The M5 Ultra Mac Studio is expected later this year; the next Pro and Max chips for the MacBook line are now the M7 Pro and M7 Max, arriving no earlier than late 2027. The M7 Ultra follows in 2028. The 1.5 TB memory ceiling, if it clears the memory market, arrives with that 2028 machine.