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I'd really like to see AV1 hardware accelerated encoding and decoding built into the M3 and see Apple standardize on it finally. The schism caused by H264 and H265 is just so annoyingly inconvenient.
Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/2023/10/apple_scary_fast_event

> It would sort of feel awkward to start launching $1,300 M3-based iMacs (or $1,000 iPad Pros) months ahead of the $3,500 Vision Pro, which will have the M2. It feels natural to me that M3-based Macs and iPads will only launch after the Vision Pro, so that when the Vision Pro is announced, the M2 is still the “current” Apple silicon generation.

I personally don't see why it would be awkward. The use case envisioned for the Vision Pro is probably not the same use case that people use the MacBook Pro for. It's hard to draw an analogy, but I can't imagine professionals and content creators will reach for the Vision Pro as the first choice for their performance intensive tasks such as video editing or whatnot. They will stick to the MacBook Pro, where that extra performance will be most valued. Moreover, especially with AMD and Intel's new chips, Apple needs to release the next generation of Apple Silicon to continue to be viewed as relevant by mainstream consumers.

Gruber seems to imply that Apple is effectively competing against themselves were they to release M3 chips before a M2 Vision Pro is released, however that assumes that the Vision Pro is intended to replace/act as an alternative to iMacs or MacBooks rather than more of a complementary member of the Apple ecosystem.

You guys voted me to negative last week, when I suggested it's dumb that $1,000 Macbook Air consistently gets the faster chips six months before their really expensive models and people posting claimed chips always trickle up with semiconductors.

Now it turns out Apple agrees with me. I think they should upgrade the Studio as well though if they are going to upgrade the MBP's.