As part of Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman’s weekly Powered On newsletter, he expects Apple to launch the future M7 Ultra chip sometime in 2028, and it could match an unprecedented feat that only the most powerful Intel Mac has achieved.
You see, before 2019, there was the 2013 Mac Pro that had a controversial “trash-can” design, and it hadn’t seen an update since then. But at WWDC 2019, Apple introduced the new Mac Pro that reverted to the traditional “cheese grater” tower design, and one of the biggest improvements was that it could be configured to up to 1.5TB of memory.
Apple continued to sell the Intel-based Mac Pro even during the company’s transition to Apple silicon for its Macs until WWDC 2023, when Apple completed the transition by replacing the 2019 Mac Pro with a new model with the M2 Ultra chip. However, although the M2 Ultra featured an improved unified memory architecture, it could be configured to up to 192GB of memory instead.
When Apple updated the Mac Studio in March 2025, the M3 Ultra model could then be configured to up to 512GB of memory for a while until March of this year, when Apple killed off that memory configuration in light of the ongoing memory chip crisis. Now, according to Mark Gurman, he expects the future M7 Ultra chip to support up to 1.5TB of memory, which would finally match the maximum memory configuration of the most powerful Intel-based Mac.
Since Apple discontinued the Mac Pro recently, it’s more than certain that only the future Mac Studio models will come equipped with what will be Apple’s most powerful chip in years. However, as previously mentioned, due to the memory shortages, only time will tell if we will ever see a configuration with that much memory for the future Mac Studio.
Apple’s M7 chips will be heavily focused on improving AI-related performance, and the Mac Studio will surely take the biggest leap when it comes to AI workloads.
