Apple has announced a “One More Thing” event for November 10th, which will presumably see the company announce its first Arm-based Macs that run on Apple Silicon chips instead of the Intel processors the company has used since 2005.
Apple Silicon was announced the WWDC conference in June. As the name implies, this is a move for Apple to get the Mac running on its own chips, just as the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch already do. Given the power of Apple’s A-series chips in devices like the iPad Pro, it’s not a huge surprise that Apple will be fully responsible fo its Mac hardware, rather than relying on Intel to provide the chips it wants to use.
It’ll be a long transition away from Intel; Apple has said it expects to take about two years. And it’ll have to keep supporting the millions of Intel-powered Macs in the wild for years to come. As for exactly what hardware we’ll see, it’s not clear yet. The first Apple Silicon developer kit is a Mac mini running the company’s A12Z chip, which is also available in the 2020 iPad Pro. Either a Mac mini or a new laptop seem like safe bets for the new hardware to arrive next week.
While Apple is rumored to start off with a MacBook of some sort for its initial Arm computer, the company’s ambitions are for its entire product lineup from laptops all the way to desktops to use Apple chips at some point down the line.
Along with new Macs, it’s also likely that the event will see the launch of macOS 11 Big Sur, which was also announced at WWDC and has been in beta for months.
As is usually the case with Apple events, this one kicks off at 10AM PT / 1PM ET, and we’ll be covering all the news live as it happens.
