Apple announces ARM transition
Macs to be Apple silicon powered, ending Intel era
Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) lived up to its billing in June with new versions of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS (see main feature, p14), but it was Apple’s future plans for the Mac that caused the biggest buzz of all.
That’s because, as expected, Apple is moving away from putting Intel silicon at the heart of the Mac, and putting its own-design ARM-based chips in there instead, with the transition beginning with products being announced later this year, and concluding by the end of 2022 – that means every Mac from the MacBook Air to the Mac Pro will eventually have Apple not Intel inside.
Speaking during Apple’s keynote address on the first day of WWDC, CEO Tim Cook said: “From the beginning, the Mac has always embraced big changes to stay at the forefront of personal computing. Today we’re announcing our transition to Apple silicon, making this a historic day for the Mac. With its powerful features and industry-leading performance, Apple silicon will make the Mac stronger and more capable than ever.”
As if to prove the point, the entirety of Craig Federighi’s macOS 11 Big Sur demonstration was conducted on a Mac mini with an A12Z SoC (System on Chip) at its heart – the exact same processor used in the current iPad Pro – and is the first Apple silicon equipped Mac system to be made available to Mac software makers in the form of the Developer Transition Kit (DTK) – the aim being to help them get ready for the Apple silicon-powered future.
Rosetta 2 and x86
For us end users, the transition will be gradual – Apple still plans to launch new Intel-based Macs this year, and the first recipients of Apple silicon are likely to be an updated 13.3-inch MacBook Pro and a new 24-inch iMac – if current rumours are to be believed. And as with the PowerPC to
Intel transition in 2004-2006, Apple is also smoothing the path from one CPU family to the other: Rosetta 2 will enable (most of your) existing Intel-based Mac apps to run on new hardware; and developers will also be creating Universal 2 application binaries that will enable the same programs to run seamlessly on both Intel and Apple silicon-based Macs.
The only obvious exception to this lies with macOS features such as Boot Camp, which enables Windows 10 to be installed on Intel-based Macs. Boot Camp will not be included in macOS 11 Big Sur, so you won’t be able to run Windows 10 natively – indeed, the only way to do so in future will be if either a) Microsoft creates a fully ARM-native version of Windows 10; or b) virtualisation software makers such as VMware or Parallels create versions of their apps that will enable x86-based programs to run inside an Apple siliconcompatible wrapper.
Every Mac will eventually have Apple not Intel inside