When Apple boss Tim Cook announced at his company’s developer conference in June 2020 that he would be giving up his long-term partner Intel and also relying on his own processors for his Mac notebooks and desktops, there was skepticism. It was an open secret in Silicon Valley that Apple had been struggling with the slow pace of Intel’s product development and the quality of the processors for a long time. But did Apple’s own developers, experienced in designing processors for smartphones and tablets, also have the necessary expertise for the PC business? Was the underlying ARM architecture, tried and tested in mobile devices in particular, sufficient for the necessary leap in performance? “When we make such fundamental changes, it is for a simple purpose: so that we can make better products,” Cook promised full-bodied at the time and announced a two-year transition phase.
