This Week's Sponsor
Magic Lasso Adblock: Effortlessly blocks ads, trackers and annoyances on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TVBy Jason Snell for Macworld
Goodbye, Intel! The chips keep changing, but the Mac remains the Mac
With the announcement that macOS Tahoe will be the last Mac OS version to support Intel Macs, Apple’s preparing to close the books on the third chip transition in Mac history.
It doesn’t get a lot of attention, but Apple is absolutely the best company in the world at picking up stakes and moving its platforms somewhere else. Over its 41 years of existence, the Mac has run on four entirely different processor architectures (not to mention two different operating system foundations), all the while remaining more or less the same familiar Mac we know and love.
This is not an easy feat to accomplish once, let alone three times. Apple’s gotten very good at this. Twenty years ago, it was the switch to Intel. Five years ago, the switch to Apple silicon started. And of course, way back in the mists of time when I was a brand-new hire at one of Macworld’s predecessor publications, Apple made the leap for the very first time.