Apple made waves at WWDC this year when it announced that it would make its own Mac chips, away from the Intel processors the company has used in its laptops and desktops since 2005.
While Apple may be new to computer chips, it has been manufacturing its own processors since the original iPad and iPhone 4. In fact, it is one of the biggest advantages of Apple’s design approach: Apple builds the chips, Apple manufactures the software, and Apple designs the hardware – every part of the process is under Apple’s control. Now, Apple is potentially poised to deliver those same benefits to its Macs.
The move to ARM, which the company refers to as “Apple silicon,” is the third-largest hardware platform for the Mac. The most recent was the 2005 transition from PowerPC chips to Intel, which then-CEO Steve Jobs explained for a simple reason. Apple needed the most powerful performance and best battery efficiency offered by Intel’s chips; The PowerPC roadmap simply wasn’t good enough for the devices Apple wanted to build.
After that change, Apple laptops underwent a radical design change. The ultrathin MacBook Air and unibody designs for its MacBook and MacBook Pro lineups burst onto the scene, all of which have had a major influence on the overall computing industry, but are still faster than ever. Now, Apple is citing those same promises of improved processing power and better battery life as the motivation for the latest change to ARM, which could indicate a similar design leap is coming.
However, that leaves the big question: how fast will Apple’s ARM chips really be?
Unfortunately, we still don’t know. And while Apple makes great chips for iPhones and iPads, the most powerful ARM computers on the market right now are ultraportable laptops like Surface X or Samsung Galaxy Book S, a far cry from high-performance laptops like MacBook Pro. Say nothing about Apple desktops like the pro-level iMac or Mac Pro.
In addition, there is the question of software. A new hardware platform means developers will have to move things around, which could lead to problems with incompatible applications or just missing software. We’ve seen it before with Surface X, which had its beautiful design undermined by a poor selection of software to actually use with it.
However, Apple does have some aces up its sleeve. As longtime Mac developer Mark Bessey says The edgeOne key difference is that “everyone uses Xcode now. There are no other developer environments that have any traction now in Mac development,” meaning that for most developers, switching to ARM is as easy as update your application to any new version of macOS and Xcode.
Then, of course, there is the iPhone. All the apps that are already running on iOS will work natively on the new Macs, which means there will be a lot of software ready for the first day. Bessey also speculates that uniting the platforms could see an explosion of new Mac apps that are universal on iOS, iPad, and macOS. Where developers may not have had an incentive to create a native Mac app before, the new ARM-based architecture means that it will be much easier to expand iPhone and iPad apps to the desktop platform.
It’s an exciting time for Mac. And who knows? Maybe Apple will continue to lend iPhone ideas and finally add touchscreens to its next wave of computers.
