Earlier this week, Apple celebrated the fifth anniversary of the launch of the very first Macs with Apple Silicon, and Apple’s marketing chief, Greg Joswiak, even celebrated this milestone on X:
“Hard to believe it’s been five years since Apple silicon transformed the Mac. The performance, battery life, new designs, amazing features, and user creativity it unlocked have been remarkable. The impact has been profound, and the Mac has never been better!” -Greg Joswiak.
At WWDC 2020, Apple announce that it would transition its entire Mac lineup from Intel processors to Apple Silicon after several years of designing Apple Silicon for both iPhone and iPad, and on November 17, 2020, Apple launched the very first Macs with Apple Silicon: the MacBook Air, the Mac mini, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro – all featured the M1 chip, the first-generation Apple Silicon chip made for the Mac.
Since then, Apple has continued to raise the bar on improving performance and energy efficiency level through the next generations of Apple Silicon while enabling new features such as on-device machine learning and hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading. To this day, Apple Silicon has enabled Macs to achieve unparalleled power and efficiency improvements compared to ever before, and it has allowed Apple to create radical designs for the Mac that just weren’t possible before with Intel processors.
With Apple Silicon, Apple was able to achieve these design feats:
- MacBook Air features a thinner design that operates without a fan for silent operation.
- The 24-inch iMac features an even thinner side profile as Apple was able to miniaturise the whole motherboard to fit inside the chin area.
- Mac Studio brings an ultra-compact design, yet features workstation-class performance with the M-series Ultra chips.
- Mac mini gets even smaller than ever before in a 5-inch square design, yet it packs so much performance thanks to M4 and M4 Pro.
Apple introduced the M5 chip last month, and next year, we should expect several Mac models to feature the rest of the M5 series of chips to bring even more power across the board.
