Intel to Apple Silicon Transition for Mac Was Announced Five Years Ago

[aaronage]

5 years of winning.

It was painful enduring years seething hatred from the folk who thought it couldn’t and wouldn’t happen… but it did happen, it’s a success, and the world is better for it.

I reserve the right to feel smug about this one 😂

 

[n8mac]

I miss not having to use my furnace in my home during the winter months. Apple made my heating bill skyrocket!

I was going to post the same thing. When i ran my intel Mac Pro my wife yelled at me for the electric bill. Now that i have a mac studio that just sips power we are happy campers. Conversely my nephew has a giant gaming PC with a top end ryzen and nvidia and his dad cant figure out why the huge electric bill.

 

[MallardDuck]

Ironically the thing that made this possible for me was windows 11 arm.

 

[Dr Nobody Important]

Apple Silicon has been the best transition for the Macintosh!

 

[Plutonius]

Rosetta 2, Crossover and Apple's GPTK made the transition easier.

 

[patrickbyrd325]

Reading this on my 2019 iMac and shedding a tear…why didn't I wait a bit longer!!

Right there with you. I have a 2019 iMac and I needed it for a work emergency during the pandemic. I’m pissed I was waiting for the M1 iMacs but they were holding off.

 

[FloatingBones]

Contrast this with Microsoft's cluster...k of Windows 10->11 hardware + software transition. Microsoft is attempting to obsolete a bunch of perfectly fine Intel machines for no good reason. Many individuals and businesses are using this occasion to ditch Windows wholesale and get on a Linux distro. In the meantime, Win11 machines running on a SnapDragon X RISC processors are quite snappy, but they're burdened by software that hasn't been cross-compiled to a RISC architecture. There's massive confusion in the entire marketplace, and I place the blame squarely on Microsoft Marketing. That's a textbook case on how NOT to do a hardware transition from Intel -> RISC. Microsoft: you are bleeding market share. 🤣

 

[lowkey]

Swapped out my 16” i9 Room heater MBP for a 14” M1 Pro MBP as soon as they were released. A great machine in comparison.

 

[SnowPenguin]

I say to all these companies that blindly copy Apple, how about you copy their transition to ARM. It would be wonderful for everyone

 

[segfaultdotorg]

And my 2020 Intel MacBook Air started running poorly soon thereafter. SAD!

 

[TSE]

I miss how hot the Core Duo MacBooks from 2006 got. It was a 2 in 1 appliance! A computer and an egg fryer!

 

[IceCool]

I refuse to believe it has been 5 years already… God I remember just sitting there watching WWDC20 on my 2017 13” as the transition was announced. It seemed so futuristic in a way, to have Mac’s powered by familiar chips to the iPhone.

I’ll never forget when I was editing a video in FCP on that 13”, fans blazing, chassis hot enough to sear steak, when my sister walked by and genuinely thought it was raining outside because it was so loud. Good memories, but they can stay memories.

 

[tommayye]

Apple silicon was announced five years ago this week, kickstarting one of the most successful periods for the Mac ever.

Following years of rumors, Apple in June 2020 unveiled its plan to transition the entire Mac lineup from Intel processors to its own custom-designed chips.

Later that year saw the release of the first three Mac models powered by Apple silicon, including a 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini.

Apple had plenty of experience after a decade of making custom iPhone and iPad chips, and it was time for the Mac to switch from x86 to Arm architecture.

The company promised, and delivered, industry-leading performance per watt for Macs. This feat allowed it to remove the fan inside the MacBook Air, given the improved power efficiency resulted in less heat being generated in the ultra-thin laptop.

"With its powerful features and industry-leading performance, Apple silicon will make the Mac stronger and more capable than ever," said Apple CEO Tim Cook, in a press release announcing the transition to Apple silicon.

"I've never been more excited about the future of the Mac," added Cook.

He had good reason to be excited.

Over the past five years, many Apple fans would agree that the Mac has gone through a renaissance. Apple silicon delivered powerful performance and power efficiency at a fraction of the price of the highest-end Intel-based Macs. Apple also went a step further by bringing back ports like HDMI and MagSafe. In many ways, the Mac has never been in a better place, especially compared to the mid-2010s era when MacBooks were equipped with faulty butterfly keyboards, and often ran loud and hot to the touch.

Apple recently announced that macOS Tahoe will be the final macOS release that is compatible with Intel-based Macs.

"From the beginning, the Mac has always embraced big changes to stay at the forefront of personal computing," said Cook.

A big change was an understatement. Apple silicon completely changed the game for the Mac when it was first announced five years ago.

Article Link: Intel to Apple Silicon Transition for Mac Announced Five Years Ago

Writing this from my M4 MacBook Pro after migrating from a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro. (Yes, I was late to get onto the M models).

I absolutely love it. I work 2 jobs so there are days I use it 10-11 hours a day and the battery life is so much better.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

I love my M3 Pro. Over a year in and I can still get a full work day on battery.

I still consider the new Mac Mini "Built to fail". The OS should be smart enough to "protect" the CPU from overheating, regardless of what I throw at it. More than 1 minute of rendering and it can boil water with the fan at Auto. It still is over 200 degrees with fans at 100%.

I nearly had a heart attack seeing those temps, until I realised they're likely in Fahrenheit. They're built to run to those temps. 226ºF (108ºC) is a bit high, but just install something like iStat Menus and customise your fan rules, and you can get it to sit around 85ºC (185ºF?) in sustained flat out running.

Silicon is great improvement.

Now get the software to the same level of performance. And I mean bugs.

Apple's SoC are a great improvement over Intel Silicon.

I can't help but feel that the bugginess of macOS is slightly overinflated. I've been using it since OS X Jaguar (10.2), and I couldn't point out any more bugginess than in the past.

 

[azentropy]

I know I was a sceptic... I even bought a then top of the line Intel 13" MBP because I didn't think it would go well at first (plus at the time I used to need to run x86 Linux in VMs). Then I got a base M1 MBA with no intention of keeping it and it knocked my socks off. For pretty much everything it blew away that MBP which was nearly 3x the cost. Ended up keeping and selling the MBP before the value crashed! Then much more rapidly replaced my other Macs...

 

[starlabjump]

I bought M1 Macbook Air (16GB,512SSD), and I still use it pleasantly along with M3 Macbook Pro.

 

[QuickDraw]

I am old enough to have witnessed the transition from 68k to PPC, PPC -> Intel, and now finally retired my 2012 mini for the M4 Mini. Apple really did do a good job to make it seamless for the average user.

 

[BNBMS]

And yet, Apple still cant make a high end and workstation grade GPU at all which is shameful.

 

[HuskerNKS]

This was a great move by Tim Cook and team!

 

[ignatius345]

Bought the M1 MBA (base model) in 2020, and it’s still going strong today. What a beast!

Though that M4 MBA is still calling out to me…😵

I made that exact upgrade from M1 Air to M4 Air recently. The M4 is definitely a lot zippier, but still nothing like the bump in speed I saw going from a 2020 Intel i5 Air to an M1 Air.

Also even after 4 months with the M4 Air, I still miss the tapered shape of the M1 and still find the notch kludgy.

 

[filmantopia]

People seem to have forgotten about how common the sentiment was that Apple would never do this, and if they did it would be a disaster.

 

[FelixDerKater]

Progress in cell phones made it inevitable. Much more $ being thrown at these chips than traditional ones.

 

[KPOM]

ARM is nice, but Apple threw away their advantage of legally being able run Mac and Windows on one computer when they ditched x86.

They could also switched to AMD which has better performance per watt than the Intel CPUs they were using, and not have to do a huge transition.

Windows 11 is available for ARM.

 

[KPOM]

Apple picked a good time to make the switch. In 2020 Intel was still stuck on the 14nm process. The MacBook Air’s chip was an awful 7W design originally intended for the 12” MacBook but which Intel couldn’t deliver at the requested 5W TDP. Other competing notebooks used a 15W TDP chip.

And then Apple comes along with a 5W TDP M1 chip for the MacBook Air that was more than twice as fast as the chip it replaced, didn’t need a fan, and could run for twice as long on battery without sacrificing performance.

 

[ZipZilla]

Giving credit where it is due: Apple Silicon just may be he greatest achievement of the Tim Cook era