Silicon

2020 – today · 5 devices

Pre-Mac1976–1983Mac era1984–1997iMac era1998–2000iPod era2001–2006iPhone era2007–2019Silicon2020–today

Apple stops buying processors and starts designing them: the Mac changes its core for the third time in its history.

The story

On June 22, 2020, Tim Cook announced that the Mac would leave Intel processors behind for chips designed by Apple: the M-series family. It was a two-year plan, accompanied by Rosetta 2 to run legacy software. The first Macs with the M1 chip — MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13″, and Mac mini — arrived in November, in the middle of the pandemic.

This wasn't a sudden leap: it rested on over a decade of chips for iPhone and iPad, built with Taiwanese partner TSMC. The same know-how born to extend a smartphone's battery life was brought to the desktop, with a leap in performance and efficiency.

For the Mac it was the third major architecture change — after Motorola→PowerPC (1994) and PowerPC→Intel (2006) — and the first time the «heart» was designed entirely in-house. The last Intel Mac, the Mac Pro, bowed out in 2023: the transition was complete.

Trivia

The Mac's fourth core

After the Motorola 68000, PowerPC, and Intel, Apple Silicon is the Mac's fourth architecture — and the first designed entirely by Apple.

Rosetta 2

To avoid leaving old software behind, Apple created Rosetta 2, which translates Intel software on the fly. The transition was unusually painless.

The most valuable company ever

In August 2020, just as it was announcing the new chips, Apple hit $2 trillion in value: the most highly valued company in history up to that point.

Buys the entire factory

Apple is so important to TSMC that it often secures the entire initial production of the most advanced nodes, before anyone else.

A developer kit

The first «Mac» with Apple Silicon didn't have an M1 chip, but a disguised Mac mini containing the iPad's A12Z processor, distributed to developers to get ready.

Devices from this period

MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2020) MacBook Air Core i5 1.1 13-inch (Retina) MacBook Air (13-inch, Late 2020 M1) iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) MacBook Air (M2, 2022)

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