Apple's new M4 chip launched alongside the new iPad Pro and the iPad Air, and what's especially interesting is that it's actually powering that iPad Pro as well. For the first time ever, Apple is launching a new SoC inside of an iPad instead of a laptop, and the timing is suspect. With Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite just around the corner and competitors in AMD and Intel closing in on the laptop space, Apple genuinely seemed, for arguably the first time, worried.

With that, things have never looked better for Qualcomm, either. Its Snapdragon X Elite chips are expected to arrive at Microsoft's Windows and Surface AI event on May 20th in Seattle. Qualcomm is already boasting 45 TOPS in its NPU, outpacing Apple's 38 TOPS, and is claiming to beat Apple's M3 chip. Given that M4 comparisons to the M3 were notably absent today as well, it makes it harder to infer directly how the X Elite may compare to Apple's newest offering.

It's only been six months since the M3 was announced

Apple's launch is weirdly early

Apple's M3 has only been in MacBooks for six months, and never even came to an iPad. The company hasn't given it any kind of shelf life, and the iPad itself launching with an M4 chip with no sign of laptops to come with it makes me think there are potentially two reasons to release it early.

1. Apple wants to get there first
2. Apple doesn't mind the M4 being seen as last generation's product when compared to Qualcomm

If Apple suspects that the M4 is going to lose to the Snapdragon X Elite, then releasing now solves two problems. The first problem that it solves is that it steals some of the limelight away from Qualcomm, a company that has been repeatedly comparing the X Elite to Apple's M3 Pro. Now there's a whole new chip on the block, a new generation, and the comparisons to M3 don't matter as much because it's the last generation.

As well, this also puts the M4 "behind" Qualcomm's launch. That serves two purposes; the first purpose is that if the M4 is better than any of the Snapdragon X series, Apple looks better. If it's worse, though, then it doesn't matter because it's the last generation's SoC anyway. It gives Apple a reason to focus on making the M5 the best product that it can be and buys time to improve its products.

There's also another reason that it buys time while combining with both of those reasons, and that's the platform that it's launching on. iPad software is locked down and arguably underpowered in comparison to macOS, to the point that benchmark testing will be very different with a different operating system and different form factor. After all, Snapdragon X Elite is a laptop chip, and who's comparing an iPad to a laptop?

Apple's loss is Qualcomm's gain

It all depends on how the public receives the M4

If Apple's M4 chip shapes up how it's looking so far, a mild upgrade at best over M3, then this may play out as the best-case scenario for Apple. No matter what, Apple is looking to buy time, and as much time as possible will save any embarrassment or fear that the company is falling behind. Especially interesting is that Apple actually made reference to AI PC, the first time in what feels like forever that the company actually treated a MacBook as being in the same league as other competitors.

With this level of performance, the neural engine and M4 is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today

That claim remains to be seen, though. Intel and AMD both have chips just around the corner that look to power PCs that don the "AI PC" crown, and the Snapdragon X Elite's numbers already look fantastic. There's more to AI than just raw TOPS though, and Apple's unified memory design might lend itself to be a major advantage for the company when it comes to AI workloads.

Depending on how Qualcomm plays this, it may well manage to actually make Windows on Arm a viable option for 2024. Apple won't rest on its laurels much longer, but it has the first-mover advantage of maintaining the Arm computing crown for a number of years at this point. Plus, much of Nuvia (before it was acquired by Qualcomm to make the Oryon cores in the Snapdragon X), is made up of ex-Apple engineers that were responsible for the original M1. Apple knows what they're capable of.

An off-year wouldn't be anything too amiss for even the biggest company in the world, but Apple most certainly won't be comfortable with that.