Apple reportedly skips high-end M6 chips to fast-track AI-focused M7 family

Apple will reportedly abandon the high-end tier of its next Mac processor generation, shipping only a base M6 chip in late 2026 before jumping to an AI-focused M7 family. The M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants have reportedly been dropped.

The rationale, according to accounts of Apple’s internal roadmap, is that the company had planned major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 generation and judged them important enough to accelerate rather than finish the M6 lineup first. The account expands on reporting from late June.

A base M7 is said to arrive in the first half of 2027, followed by M7 Pro and Max chips late that year and an M7 Ultra in 2028. That top-end M7 Ultra could reportedly power Apple Intelligence servers — the cloud hardware behind Apple’s generative AI features — beginning in 2029.

On specifications, the base M6 reportedly raises memory bandwidth to about 200 gigabytes per second, from 153 on the M5, and adds two graphics cores for 12. The M7 Ultra is said to support up to 1.5 terabytes of memory and approach the AI performance of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips.

Apple has confirmed none of this and does not comment on unreleased products; chip roadmaps routinely shift before hardware ships. A 14-inch MacBook Pro built on the base M6 is still expected later in 2026.

If the plan holds, Apple’s most powerful Mac silicon would double as the engine for its AI cloud, a bet that its own chips can rival Nvidia’s in the data centre.