This Year’s WWDC Could Signal the End of Intel Macs (Here’s What That Means)

We’ve been hearing reports for at least a couple of years now that Apple was working on transitioning its Mac lineup away from Intel chips in favour of leveraging its own chip-making expertise with ARM processors, and now it looks like this year’s WWDC could signal the beginning of a new era for Mac users.

After all, Apple’s A-series chips used in the iPhone and iPad are already the fastest mobile chips on the planet, and they don’t just beat out other smartphones, but they also run circles around modern PCs. In fact, reports suggest that, thanks to Apple’s new A14 chip, this year’s iPhone 12 could be as powerful as a MacBook Pro.

There’s also the fact that, even aside from Apple’s reticence to rely on third-party suppliers for critical components, Intel’s chips haven’t been without their problems. You may remember the ZombieLoad security flaw from last year, and the Markdown vulnerability from the year before — these were both hardware flaws in Intel’s chips, and while Apple was able to patch them with macOS updates, it shouldn’t have needed to.

So it’s probably not surprising that Apple wants to transition its Macs to using chips of its own design, but the bigger question has been how the company will go about doing this and when it will all start to happen. According to Bloomberg, however, it could actually be just around the corner.

Citing sources familiar with Apple’s plans, it looks like the company is preparing to announce the transition to its own main processors at this year’s WWDC, likely at the keynote to be held on June 22. The initiative, codenamed Kalamata is intended to give developers a heads-up so that they can begin transitioning their apps over to the new architecture, which will reportedly be the same as that currently used in Apple’s A-series chips, although it’s unlikely that the Mac will use the exact same chips, merely new chips based on the same architecture and design.

What This Means

To be clear, this isn’t the first time Apple has gone down this road. Apple didn’t actually begin using Intel processors until almost 15 years ago; prior to that, Macs were based on an IBM-Motorola architecture known as PowerPC. In fact, Apple’s laptops back then were called iBooks and PowerBooks; it wasn’t until the transition to Intel CPUs that the MacBook was born.

Apple made the transition to Intel for various reasons, although the wider compatibility with the PC world was certainly an important benefit, especially back in a day when many still needed to run at least some Windows apps. Of course, it was a different world back then, and with the dominance of the iPhone and iPad today, as well as a much more robust Mac app ecosystem, there’s less incentive for Apple to stay with Intel, especially if it figured that it can do better on its own.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that iOS itself is coming to the Mac just because the underlying architecture will be the same, Bloomberg notes that future Macs will still use the macOS operating system, and in fact much like the transition from PowerPC back in the day, you probably won’t even notice the difference on the surface.

Under the hood, Mac apps will have to be rewritten for the new architecture, but in many cases this should be fairly easy for developers to do. When Apple made the transition to Intel back in 2006, it also included a dynamic translator, known as Rosetta, into OS X to allow PowerPC based apps to continue running on the newer Intel-based Macs in order to smooth the transition. It’s unclear if Apple will do something similar for its ARM transition, but it seems likely.

In more practical terms, however, the move to ARM-based Macs should result in significant improvements both in graphics performance and power efficiency, with sources suggesting that tests of the new technology inside Apple have already shown “sizeable improvements” in performance over Intel-powered versions in configurations that could result in even thinner and lighter MacBooks.

Apple is reportedly working on three Mac processors right now. The first one will be based on the A14 chip that is expected to be included in the iPhone 12 this fall, and will include the same sort of GPU and Neural Engine, allowing Apple to leverage more AI functionality on the Mac than has previously been possible.

All of the said, Apple’s unveiling of the new technology at WWDC is expected to be an announcement so that developers can begin getting ready for the transition. Actual ARM-based Macs aren’t expected to begin arriving until at least 2021, so any additional Macs released this year will continue to use Intel chips, and by the time the first ARM-based Macs appear, Apple and third-party developers will have hopefully addressed all of the issues to ensure a smooth transition to the new architecture.

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]