Mac to the future

Apple is at a turning point with Mac hardware – but just where could it go in the next five or 10 years? Let’s imagine…

Apple silicon has changed the game. It is not Apple’s first big platform change – while it seems silly to include the 6502, the Mac has seen 68000, PowerPC and X86 chips before the M1 – but it is the most significant in, if not the Mac’s lifespan, at least a generation. The ARM64based Apple silicon is a more flexible, versatile system-on-a-chip (SoC) processor, and crucially it is Apple designed…

If there is anything Apple treasures more than anything, it is control over its own platforms. Apple silicon, starting with the M1 chip, gives the company precisely that. An almost entirely closed shop.

The MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and the Mac mini have gone M1. At the time of writing, a number of iMac models had also been killed off, suggesting the iMac will be next in line. The rumour mill suggests the Mac Pro (already behind M1 laptops in terms of rendering power) will get its refresh in 2022, with a Mac Pro mini also anticipated. After that? Apple has never been afraid of radical innovation, so why shouldn’t now be the jumping off point for a new generation of Mac hardware? There’s a lot to be learned from the changing direction of the PC, and much to be gained from incorporating mobile innovations. Let’s dust off the (admittedly rather scuffed) MacFormat crystal ball, and forsee what we’d like to see in the world of Mac. Real-world rumours swirl about a future MacBook with a completely non-mechanical keyboard, no scissor or butterfly switches, just a flat expanse of touchsensitive nothing. This sounds, frankly, like a horrible idea, so let’s start our journey into this imagined future with something better: the MacBook Touch, a laptop which puts fingers first.

The MacBook Touch brings the apparently doomed Touch Bar into the next generation. Apple makes it far larger, perhaps half the height of the keyboard, and gives it contextual interactions for every app, or full customisation which gives the cleverlytitled ‘Genius Bar’ a versatility it has never had before. Perhaps the screen extends on to it, in the style of Asus’ ZenBook Pro Duo laptops, offering extra real estate to secondary apps; maybe Apple finds a way to include the

Apple has never been afraid of radical innovation

Future Macs could come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, including the G4 Cube-like Mac Pro mini.

A ‘MacPad’ could team an iPad-like tablet with a keyboard/battery base for extra oomph when you’re deskbound.

The M1 chip provides superior performance; in-house Apple silicon advances will continue to up the ante.