How 30 years of chip transitions paved the way for the spectacular Apple Silicon era

Apple's preparing to close the books on the third chip transition in Mac history.

- BY JASON SNELL

With the announcement that macOS Tahoe will be the last Mac OS version to support Intel Macs (fave.co/3I0LRkW), 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 (fave.co/4kb3E6k). Five years ago, the switch to Apple silicon (fave.co/3Kcdhm9) 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.

The original Mac came with a Motorola 68000 processor.

HARD-EARNED LESSONS

When I wrote about the Mac's history of chip transitions (fave.co/3J59mEm) as rumors of the Apple silicon transition swirled, I made great pains to point out that Apple had been there, done that, and learned many lessons. My only concern was if there was anyone left at Apple who had lived through the old transitions, or if the company was going to have to figure it out from scratch all over again.

After that story was published, I heard from someone inside Apple who assured me that, yes, there were still some people kicking around who had been there when that very first chip transition happened back in the 1990s. That kind of institutional memory was vitally important to Apple's transitions in 2005 and 2020, as it turned out.