Apple hasn’t officially said anything yet, but the move from Intel processors to internally designed chips on Macs has been speculated for a long time. Now it’s beginning to look like this is more than just a rumour.
The logical event for making such an announcement would be Apple’s developer conference, WWDC. After all, it was at WWDC 2005 where Steve Jobs announced a move from PowerPC to Intel. Mark Gurman reporting for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is preparing to announce a shift to its own main processors in Mac computers, replacing chips from Intel Corp., as early as this month at its annual developer conference [WWDC], according to people familiar with the plans.
These new Apple-designed chips would probably be using technology licensed from Arm, originally a British company now part of the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank. Everybody assumes it would be a similar setup to what Apple has done already for some time with iPhones and iPads.
There are many reasons for Apple to make this change but the main reason is performance. People have been lamenting about the growing performance gap between iPads and Macs on numerous podcasts and blogs. According to Mark Gurman:
Apple’s chip-development group, led by Johny Srouji, decided to make the switch after Intel’s annual chip performance gains slowed. Apple engineers worried that sticking to Intel’s road map would delay or derail some future Macs, according to people familiar with the effort.
Another reason is of course obtaining more control over the chip development road map. Finally, there’s the cost aspect. John Gruber from Daring Fireball writes:
There are other reasons too. It’s cheaper for Apple to make its own chips than to buy Intel’s. They already make a $400 iPhone that out-benchmarks a $3,000 top-of-the-line MacBook Pro in single-core CPU performance. That’s bananas when you think about it.
If Apple is going to stick to the schedule reported by Bloomberg, i.e. rolling out new Arm-based Macs in 2021, it seems clear that they have to make an announcement at WWDC later this month. Developers will obviously need time to get their Mac apps ready, even though Apple will surely support this process by quickly making a new version of Xcode available. They might even make it possible for Arm-based Macs to run older x86 software via emulation.
Apple has been using Intel chips in Macs since 2006. Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash.
In any case, I’m sure all Apple fans are eagerly waiting for an official confirmation of the news. The future of the Mac is finally starting to look brighter. Yes, there are still things that suck, like the bad laptop cameras I wrote about earlier and why can’t be have cellular connection on laptops in addition to wifi, like we have on iPads?
But hey, the Mac Pro wasn’t dead after all and as a bonus we got the iMac Pro. The miserable butterfly keyboard has been replaced in all laptop models. They even released a powerful 16” MacBook Pro and the recently updated MacBook Air is something we can now actually recommended, without any major caveats, to anyone looking for a good, reasonably priced laptop.
It feels like the Mac is finally getting the love and care from Apple that it deserves!