Apple Confirms Their Future Desktops + Laptops Will Use In-House CPUs

Apple finally confirmed the log-running rumor that their future laptops and desktop computers will be using in-house silicon with their custom designed Arm-based chips.

Before the end of the year, the first Mac with Apple silicon will ship while they envision a two year transition period until their entire product portfolio is Arm-based. Apple is motivated in part to use their in-house chips for better power efficiency and greater GPU performance than what is currently achieved via their Intel processors.

Apple did confirm that there are new Intel-based Macs still in development and they will continue to support future macOS releases on Intel CPUs for years to come.

These Arm-based MacBooks/iMacs will be able to run iOS/iPadOS applications without modifications in conjunction with macOS "Big Sur" coming out later in the year.

With macOS Big Sur and Xcode 12 based on LLVM Clang, Apple is plumbing the capability with Universal 2 application binaries to offer a single app that runs with native performance on both x86_64 and Arm. Apple also mentioned in today's press release, " With the translation technology of Rosetta 2, users will be able to run existing Mac apps that have not yet been updated, including those with plug-ins. Virtualization technology allows users to run Linux." Apple even demoed Linux virtualization with the GNOME Shell desktop running as part of their WWDC 2020 keynote:

But for bare metal Linux on future Macs with Apple SoCs, this is likely yet another obstacle on top of all the difficulties in recent years for running Linux distributions on MacBooks and iMacs and even Mac Minis.