Looking Back on Twenty Years of Intel Macs ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

What’s striking about the Intel Mac era is that Apple switched to and away from Intel chips for basically the same reason: It was looking for a more compelling processor roadmap and the best possible performance-per-Watt for its chips. When Intel was executing well—and during the decade between the mid-00s and mid-2010s, Intel was executing exceptionally well—Apple wanted in. It was only after years of watching Intel struggle that Apple wanted out.

Apple used Motorola CPUs for ten years, PowerPC processors for eleven, and Intel for fifteen. Unbelievably, we are already six years into the Apple Silicon Mac era.

Given the kinds of things made possible by the ARM-based processors in today’s Macs, it is difficult not to imagine this transition was inevitable, though perhaps catalyzed by the Intel models in the mid-to-late-2010s. I harbour a small fascination with the culmination of issues in that generation of Macs not limited to the processors; Cunningham points to a former Intel engineer’s comments that Skylake generation processors were a key point of friction. If you know a lot about the engineering story behind those Macs, like the keyboards, I would love to hear from you, perhaps on Signal.