The Next Phase: Apple Lays Out Plans To Transition Macs from x86 to Apple SoCs

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After many months of rumors and speculation, Apple confirmed this morning during their annual WWDC keynote that the company intends to transition away from using x86 processors at the heart of their Mac family of computers. Replacing the venerable ISA – and the exclusively-Intel chips that Apple has been using – will be Apple’s own Arm-based custom silicon, with the company taking their extensive experience in producing SoCs for iOS devices, and applying that to making SoCs for Macs. With the first consumer devices slated to ship by the end of this year, Apple expects to complete the transition in about two years.

The last (and certainly most anticipated) segment of the keynote, Apple’s announcement that they are moving to using their own SoCs for future Macs was very much a traditional Apple announcement. Which is to say that it offered just enough information to whet developers (and consumers’) appetites without offering too much in the way of details too early. So while Apple has answered some very important questions immediately, there’s also a whole lot more we don’t know at the moment, and likely won’t known until late this year when hardware finally starts shipping.

What we do know, for the moment, is that this is the ultimate power play for Apple, with the company intending to leverage the full benefits of vertical integration. This kind of top-to-bottom control over hardware and software has been a major factor in the success of the company’s iOS devices, both with regards to hard metrics like performance and soft metrics like the user experience. So given what it’s enabled Apple to do for iPhones, iPads, etc, it’s not at all surprising to see that they want to do the same thing for the Mac. Even though the OS itself isn’t changing (much), the ramifications of Apple building the underlying hardware down to the SoC means that they can have the OS make full use of any special features that Apple bakes into their A-series SoCs. Idle power, ISPs, video encode/decode blocks, and neural networking inference are all subjects that are potentially on the table here.

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