After years of rumors, it appears that Apple is finally going to commit to releasing Macs that run on Apple-designed ARM processors rather than chips made by Intel. Based on reports, the announcement could come as soon as this month's WWDC 2020 event, though Apple wouldn't make the switch until 2021 to give developers enough time to adjust.
If there's a company that is perfectly positioned to make this switch happen, it's Apple. Not only has Apple already pulled this trick off twice before, but it stands to benefit enormously by ditching Intel for the company that's making the best mobile processors in the business — Apple itself.
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Here, then, are the top five reasons why you'll want to seriously consider buying a new Mac laptop powered by Apple-designed processors.
They're going to be blazing fast
Apple's processors are already the hands-down champions in the mobile world. In the past few years, Apple's been shipping new iPhones with upgraded processors before Android phones have even caught up with the previous iPhone. When Apple released the iPad Pro in late 2018, the company claimed the tablet was faster than more than 90 percent of all laptops sold that year.
One reason the current-model iPad Pro is faster than most laptops is its abundance of processor cores. Last year Apple unveiled a high-end configuration of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with eight processor cores, but the iPad Pro has had eight cores since 2018. The current model has four cores that are focused on energy efficiency, and four that are designed to maximize performance. The system dynamically switches between them — and can even use all eight simultaneously to maximize processing power. Let's not mention the seven (eight on 2020 models) cores in the Apple-designed GPU, and the machine-learning Neural Engine cores.
And that's a processor from 2018 designed for an iPad. What do you think Apple will do in 2021, with a processor designed with higher-stress Mac performance in mind? It's hard to imagine that ARM-based Mac laptops won't be packing serious power.
Mobile chips are famously good at power efficiency
Laptops aren't just about maximizing power, of course — they need to balance performance with battery life and weight. Apple's ARM processors have always been designed for devices with batteries, iPhones and iPads and even Apple Watches.
It will be interesting to see how Apple balances these two points. The current iPad Pro and MacBook Pro models both claim 10 hours of battery life, suggesting that Apple's might be more likely to shoot for a reasonable target battery life. Regardless, it's hard to imagine that Apple's own processors won't be specifically tuned to maximize battery life when necessary — and do a far better job than Intel processors do.
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