Apple releases M4 Max chip icon ahead of new MacBook Pro announcement

Oops! Sharp-eyed developer Charlie Joseph discovered today that Apple has leaked its upcoming high-end M4 Max chip through an image uploaded to its website. The discovery was shared with Bloombergis Mark Gurman on social media.

It was already pretty obvious that Apple was planning to announce new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips this week after Apple announced several Mac related announcements had promised. The image of the M4 Max chip now underlines that Apple is preparing to announce the new laptops soon. Apple is expected to unveil the new MacBook Pro models with a press release and video on Wednesday.

Here's the image of the M4 Max icon and an Apple.com link to it while it lasts:

Because of this leak, the 14-inch MacBook Pro base model leak in Russia, and the new Mac mini leak on Amazon, Apple is struggling to keep these M4 Mac announcements secret, which is pretty rare territory for the company.

This discovery comes after Apple today announced the M4 Pro chip alongside the new Mac mini. Key specifications of the M4 Pro chip include a CPU with up to 14 cores, a GPU with up to 20 cores, a 16-core Neural Engine, support for up to 64GB of RAM, support for Thunderbolt 5, and increased speed of 273 GB/s of memory bandwidth. For the M4 Pro chip with 14-core CPU, there are 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores. The M4 Max's specs haven't been leaked, but performance will obviously be even higher than the M4 Pro chip.

Apple is expected to announce a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 chip, as well as higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M4 Pro and M4 Max chips.

No major external design changes have been rumored for the MacBook Pro lineup this year. More significant improvements such as an OLED display and a thinner design are not expected until 2026 at the earliest. However, the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro is expected to have an additional Thunderbolt port compared to the current model, based on alleged leaks earlier this month. The same leaks revealed that the MacBook Pro range might finally launch with 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB. We've already seen this trend with the new iMac and Mac mini, both of which have at least 16GB of RAM across all configurations.

Based on the Mac mini with the M4 Pro chip, it is quite likely that MacBook Pro models with M4 Pro and M4 Max chips will also support Thunderbolt 5 for data transfer speeds of up to 120 Gbps, but this is not official yet confirmed.

Apple last redesigned the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro in 2021, and the latest models with the M3 family of chips were released last October.