Apple silicon in the context of Macintosh clone

Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh apple. The current product lineup includes the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, and the iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro desktops. Macs are currently sold with Apple's UNIX-based macOS operating system, which is not licensed to other manufacturers and exclusively bundled with Mac computers. This operating system replaced Apple's original Macintosh operating system, which has variously been named System, Mac OS, and Classic Mac OS.

Jef Raskin conceived the Macintosh project in 1979, which was usurped and redefined by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1981. The original Macintosh was launched in January 1984 at US$2,495 (equivalent to $7,600 in 2024), after Apple's "1984" advertisement during Super Bowl XVIII. A series of incrementally improved models followed, sharing the same integrated case design. In 1987, the Macintosh II brought color graphics, but priced as a professional workstation and not a personal computer. Beginning in 1994 with the Power Macintosh, the Mac transitioned from Motorola 68000 series processors to PowerPC. Macintosh clones by other manufacturers were also briefly sold afterwards. The line was refreshed in 1998 with the launch of the iMac G3, reinvigorating the line's competitiveness against commodity IBM PC compatibles. Macs transitioned to Intel x86 processors by 2006 along with new sub-product lines MacBook and Mac Pro. Since 2020, Macs have transitioned to Apple silicon chips based on ARM64.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).

The MacBook Pro with Apple silicon is a line of Mac notebook computers introduced in November 2020 by Apple. It is the higher-end model of the MacBook family, sitting above the consumer-focused MacBook Air, and is currently sold with 14-inch (360 mm) and 16-inch (410 mm) screens. All models use Apple-designed M series systems on a chip.

The first MacBook Pro with Apple silicon, based on the Apple M1, was released in November 2020.

macOS Tahoe (version 26) is the twenty-second and current major release of Apple's macOS operating system. The successor to macOS Sequoia (macOS 15), it was announced at WWDC 2025 on June 9, 2025, and its first developer beta was released the same day. It was released on September 15, 2025.

Tahoe is the final version of macOS that supports Macs with Intel processors; the 2020 iMac, the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 4-port 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the 2019 Mac Pro models are supported. Future versions will work only on Macs with Apple silicon systems on a chip (SoCs). It is the first version of macOS since Mac OS X Snow Leopard that cannot be upgraded from an older version via the Mac App Store; upgrading it is exclusively available through the System Settings software update preference pane, as is the case with iOS.

The Apple–Intel architecture is an unofficial name used for Macintosh personal computers developed and manufactured by Apple Inc. that use Intel x86 processors, rather than the PowerPC and Motorola 68000 ("68k") series processors used in their predecessors or the ARM-based Apple silicon SoCs used in their successors. As Apple changed the architecture of its products, they changed the firmware from the Open Firmware used on PowerPC-based Macs to the Intel-designed Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). With the change in processor architecture to x86, Macs gained the ability to boot into x86-native operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows), while Intel VT-x brought near-native virtualization with macOS as the host OS.

The Mac transition to Apple silicon was the process of switching the central processing units (CPUs) of Apple's line of Mac computers from Intel's x86-64 processors to Apple-designed Apple silicon ARM64 systems-on-a-chip.

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a "two-year transition plan" to Apple silicon on June 22, 2020. The first Macs with Apple-designed systems on a chip were released that November; the last with an Intel processor, the Mac Pro, was discontinued in June 2023, completing the transition in three years.

The MacBook Pro is a line of Mac laptop computers developed and manufactured by Apple. Introduced in 2006, it is the high-end sibling of the MacBook family, sitting above the ultra-portable MacBook Air and previously the low-end MacBook line. It is currently sold with 14-inch and 16-inch screens, all using Apple M-series chips. Before Apple silicon, the MacBook Pro used Intel chips, and was the first laptop made by Apple to do so, replacing the earlier PowerBook. It was also the first Apple laptop to carry the MacBook moniker.

Apple M1 is a series of ARM-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., launched in 2020. It is part of the Apple silicon series, as a central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) for its Mac desktops and notebooks, and the iPad Pro and iPad Air tablets. The M1 chip initiated Apple's third change to the instruction set architecture used by Macintosh computers, switching from Intel to Apple silicon fourteen years after they were switched from PowerPC to Intel, and twenty-six years after the transition from the original Motorola 68000 series to PowerPC. At the time of its introduction in 2020, Apple said that the M1 had "the world's fastest CPU core in low power silicon" and the world's best CPU performance per watt. Its successor, Apple M2, was announced on June 6, 2022, at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

The original M1 chip was introduced in November 2020, and was followed by the professional-focused M1 Pro and M1 Max chips in October 2021. The M1 Max is a higher-powered version of the M1 Pro, with more GPU cores and memory bandwidth, a larger die size, and a large used interconnect. Apple introduced the M1 Ultra in 2022, a desktop workstation chip containing two interconnected M1 Max units. These chips differ largely in size and the number of functional units: for example, while the original M1 has about 16 billion transistors, the M1 Ultra has 114 billion.