SAN FRANCISCO - Apple on Tuesday (Nov 10) introduced a MacBook Air notebook and other computers with the first microprocessor designed in-house, a move that will tie its Macs and iPhones closer together technologically.
The new chip, called the M1, marks a shift away from Intel technology that has driven the electronic brains of Mac computers for nearly 15 years.
It is a boon for Apple computers, which are overshadowed by the company’s iPhone but still rack up tens of billions of dollars in sales per year. Apple hopes developers now will create families of apps that work on both computers and phones.
The MacBook Air will start at US$999 (S$1,300), the same as its predecessor, and have up to twice the battery life, Apple said.
The M1 will also power the MacBook Pro notebook, which starts at US$1299, and its US$699 Mac Mini computer, which comes without a monitor.
The Mini is targeted at engineers and scientists because of artificial intelligence capabilities of the new chip that usually require a graphics chip from Nvidia Corp or AMD.
The new products will be available from next week, executives said.
Shares of Apple were up about 0.2 per cent as the event ended.
In June, Apple said it would begin outfitting Macs with its own chips, building on its decade-long history of designing processors for its iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches.
Apple executives said on Tuesday that the M1 was intended to be efficient as well as fast, to improve battery life, and that Apple’s newest version of its operating system was tuned to the processor.
“This announcement underscores how important high-performance, custom processor designs will be to leading the next generation of client computing,” said Jon Carvill, vice-president of Nuvia, a data centre chip firm founded by former Apple executives.
“We think a similar trend is playing out in the future of the data center as well.”
Apple executives made numerous performance claims against Windows-based laptops and prior generations of Macs, virtually all of which are based on Intel chips, though Apple did not directly name Intel.
“We believe Intel-powered PCs – like those based on 11th Gen Intel Core mobile processors – provide global customers the best experience in the areas they value most, as well as the most open platform for developers, both today and into the future,” Intel said in a statement.
Apple’s phone chips draw on computing architecture technology from UK-based Arm and manufactured by outside partners such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp , or TSMC.
Microsoft and Qualcomm have been working together for four years to bring Arm-based Windows laptops to market, with major manufacturers such as Lenovo Group, Asustek Computer and Samsung Electronics offering machines.
But for both Microsoft and Apple, the true test will be software developers. Apple is hoping that the massive group of iPhone developers will embrace the new Macs, which will share a common 64-bit Arm computing architecture with the iPhone and be able to use similar apps.
Apple software chief Craig Federighi said Adobe Inc would bring its Photoshop software to the new M1-based Macs early next year.
Apple has seen a boom in Mac sales due to the coronavirus pandemic, notching record fiscal fourth quarter Mac sales of US$9 billion earlier this month – all of them Intel-based. In June, Chief Executive Tim Cook said Apple would continue to support those devices for “years to come” but did not specify an end-of-life date.
