Apple To Ditch Intel And Use Its Own Chips In Macs

The tech giant Apple will abandon Intel microprocessors on its Macs and start using its own exclusive chips from 2020 according to Mark Gurman, who has an unblemished reputation when it comes to publishing about future plans for the company.

The plan to abandon the dependence of Intel is part of an initiative called Kalamata which seeks to unify the experience of use in all the devices of the company, like iPhones, iPads and Macs. Although Gurman says that the plan is already underway, if it is done, it would require several steps from both Apple and developers.

The news has been bad on Wall Street, as the giant chip maker Intel’s shares have fallen by 9% in the last minutes.

It is not the first time that the tech giant Apple decides to migrate microprocessor architecture on their Macs, in fact, it is the third. The first time occurred when the Motorola 68K was changed, used from the Macintosh 128K until March 1994 when the company launched the first computer with a PowerPC processor.

The PowerPC microprocessors were a joint initiative between Motorola, IBM and Apple. It represented an immense step in terms of performance. It also started the processor war against Intel. The tech giant Apple claimed that its chips, based on a RISC architecture, were much more efficient, capable of being much faster without the need to consume so much energy,

In fact, for a good period of time, Apple manufactured computers with PowerPC processors capable of delivering much greater performance than PCs with Intel processors. But it was not forever.

The PowerPC G5, although extremely powerful consumed so much energy that Apple was never able to fit them inside a laptop. Although the PowerBook G4 was extremely popular and represented years of advantage over the competition, in terms of performance, autonomy and design, Intel not only stepped on the heels but over time advanced both in speed and efficiency. The PowerBook G5 never arrived.

WWDC 2005 arrived and Steve Jobs announced what millions of fans of the company never imagined listening: Apple would adopt Intel processors. Today it seems normal, but at that time it was inconceivable. Still, it happened. Mac OS X always had a hidden “twin brother” that ran on x86 architecture. Apple made a fairly clean transition through universal binaries, that is, applications compiled for the two architectures.

Years later support for PowerPC was abandoned taking us to where we are today, where Apple is faced with the same problem: Intel processors on Macs represent two problems:-

1. Dependence on a third party, in this case, the giant chip maker Intel.

2. They are not enough anymore. Intel has not been able to adapt to the current times when extremely efficient and fast processors are needed. Apple has been able to design extremely fast ARM chips in ultra-portable devices. iPads are faster than most MacBooks. That cannot continue happening.

Therefore the tech giant Apple embarks on a long migration process that, according to Bloomberg, would be announced in 2020. Surely they have macOS running under ARM architecture for years. Surely Xcode will allow you to compile applications for the two architectures.

If the tech giant Apple is able to make the transition in the same way as in 2005, consumers will not be affected. In return, we will have much lighter laptops, much thinner, with much more battery and above all, much faster.

Using similar processors (or the same ones) as in iPhones and iPads, it is possible that the company is developing an iOS version for laptops as well, a new generation of the operating system capable of using keyboard and pointer, that is, mouse or trackpad.