MacBook Pro won’t have Big Update due to Intel 10nm Cannon Lake Delays

Apple customers waiting for a new-update MacBook Pro with 32 gigabytes of memory may have to wait until 2019, so don’t get too many ideas this year, as problems with Intel itself have delayed the release of Cannon Lake.

The old annual Apple tradition is to update Mac series in fall, the revamped MacBook Pro should be just a routine update, but not as critical updates with 10nm Cannon Lake, after Intel’s warning that its 10nm “Cannon Lake” processors won’t be shipping in high volumes in 2018, pushing the wider availability of the chip into 2019.

Cannon Lake is said to be able to switch to a 10nm process, but it’s possible to continue with 14nm for another year.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich advised the change in pace was caused through issues achieving suitably high yields of 10nm chips. Rather than try to achieve high volume production this year, and potentially waste considerable portions of wafers used in manufacturing, the company is instead taking time to fix issues before attempting mass production.

The confirmed delay in “Cannon Lake” production not the first to happen to the next-generation processor line. In April 2017, it was rumored Intel would hold back introducing the processor line until 2018, while another report in September of that year suggested it would be pushed back from early 2018 to the end of the year.

Aside from waiting for “Cannon Lake” to arrive, the more immediate candidates for use in a MacBook could use “Coffee Lake,” a 14nm platform that still doesn’t support LPDDR4 RAM. Intel introduced new processors earlier this month that included the Core i9-8950HK, a six-core processor with a base clock speed of 2.9GHz, Turbo Boost to 4.8GHz, and the same 45-watt thermal design power as the quad-core 2.8GHz Core i7 used in the entry-level 15-inch MacBook Pro.

At the same time, the outside world agrees laptop products don’t have to be updated every year so often, Apple might as well launch a revamped MacBook Pro next year, so it doesn’t run out of CPU.