Apple Is Putting Its Own Chips in the Mac
At WWDC 2020, Apple confirmed the Mac will move from Intel to its own ARM-based Apple Silicon, starting this year.
Well, it’s official. After years of rumors, leaks, and educated guessing, Apple used today’s WWDC keynote to confirm that the Mac is leaving Intel behind. Future Macs will run on Apple’s own custom silicon — the same lineage of ARM-based chip design that’s been powering iPhones and iPads for over a decade. Apple says the transition starts by the end of this year and will take about two years to work through the entire Mac lineup.
This is a genuinely big deal, and not just as a spec-sheet update. Apple has been designing its own chips for mobile since the A4 showed up in the original iPad, and each generation has closed the gap with — and in some workloads surpassed — laptop-class Intel silicon, all while sipping a fraction of the power. Bringing that design philosophy to the Mac means Apple is no longer tied to Intel’s roadmap, release schedule, or thermal ceilings. If the iPhone and iPad chips are any indication, we should expect the pitch to center on efficiency: longer battery life and cooler, quieter machines without giving up performance.
What this means for developers
The obvious question for anyone who writes software for the Mac is: what happens to existing Intel apps? Apple didn’t leave that hanging — they announced a new version of Rosetta (Rosetta 2, presumably drawing on the same translation approach Apple used during the PowerPC-to-Intel switch back in 2006) to let existing Intel-compiled apps run on the new chips. There’s also a new set of developer tools aimed at making it straightforward to build “universal” apps that run natively on both architectures during the transition window. Apple even seeded developers with transition kits in the past for less disruptive silicon changes, so expect something similar here to get software ready ahead of the actual hardware launch.
The rest of WWDC
Apple Silicon was the headline, but it wasn’t the only announcement. Apple also unveiled the next releases across its whole software lineup: iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, macOS Big Sur, tvOS 14, and watchOS 7. The watchOS update is notable for finally adding native sleep tracking — something third-party apps have covered for years, but which Apple is now baking directly into the platform.
The bigger picture
Switching CPU architectures under an entire product line is not a small operation, and Apple has done it before — from Motorola’s 68k chips to PowerPC, and then PowerPC to Intel. Both of those transitions took real work from the developer community and a stretch of “translated” performance before native software caught up. The two-year timeline Apple is giving itself suggests this will be a similarly gradual rollout rather than an overnight swap: expect the first Apple Silicon Macs to slot in as pieces of the lineup, not a total replacement on day one.
It’s also a striking vote of confidence in Apple’s chip design team, who’ve quietly become one of the most capable in the industry. If the performance-per-watt gains from mobile carry over to the Mac, this could be the most consequential change to Apple’s computer lineup in over a decade. We’ll be watching closely for the first hardware later this year.