Today, Apple has unveiled their brand-new MacBook line-up. This isn’t an ordinary release – if anything, the move that Apple is making today is something that hasn’t happened in 15 years: The start of a CPU architecture transition across their whole consumer Mac line-up.
Thanks to the company’s vertical integration across hardware and software, this is a monumental change that nobody but Apple can so swiftly usher in. The last time Apple ventured into such an undertaking in 2006, the company had ditched IBM’s PowerPC ISA and processors in favor of Intel x86 designs. Today, Intel is being ditched in favor of the company’s own in-house processors and CPU microarchitectures, built upon the Arm ISA.