It’s Official: Apple Is Now a Silicon Company

Gather round, folks. I promise to make Plaintext net-zero by 2030! If I’m still writing it then.

The Plain View

In October 2011, after a cathartic memorial service at a venerated chapel on Stanford’s campus, 300 or so of Steve Jobs’ friends, family members, and associates took a short walk to a candlelit reception under the full moon. I found myself in a conversational cluster with Bill Gates, Tim Cook, some early Apple employees, and Bono. Gates and some of the Apple people were in a heated debate over Apple’s choice of the 68000 chip for the Macintosh.

Throughout Apple’s history, many of its most significant decisions have involved which chips and which chipmaker would power its devices. The 68000 and its follow-ons were made by Motorola, whose chips also powered the original Apple II. Later, Apple adopted the PowerPC RISC chips made by IBM and Motorola. It was a seismic shift when the company moved its Mac line to Intel chips starting in 2006. In 2007, the iPhone was rolled out with a microprocessor that Steve Jobs wasn’t pleased with—a Samsung ARM chip that didn’t provide sufficient oomph. Not long after, Jobs concluded that Apple would never attain the heights he envisioned using someone else’s chips. Apple, he vowed, would make its own artisanally crafted silicon chips to service the company’s own needs and allow for innovative leaps that no one else was thinking of.

Apple’s spring event, which took place earlier this week, was the ultimate evidence that Jobs’ vision has fully come to pass. Apple’s custom chips have driven its phones for the past few years, and beginning last year, they started to appear in Macs too. The April product refresh, a presentation recorded in the verdant foliage of Apple’s $5 billion ghost town of a headquarters, might have looked like a somewhat random set of announcements. But underlining it all was a theme—which doubled as a stealthy boast. This is what we can do when we make our own chips.

The star of the show was Apple’s M1 chip, which has been supercharging MacBooks since last fall. This year it found its way into the iMac, which was reimagined specifically to exploit the attributes of the microprocessor and attendant chips. The powerful chip makes the iMac run faster; Apple promises instant-on. And the M1’s efficiency allowed Apple to build a much smaller enclosure, with a shockingly svelte profile.

A mobile device with an M1 inside can perform tasks that would run much more slowly, or not at all, with chips optimized to save power. It allows the iPad Pro to run faster and take on big tasks like rendering augmented reality. And on the bigger 12.9-inch model, it now lights up thousands of tiny LEDs to deliver what it calls “Liquid Retina XDR.” (Translation: It’s brighter.)

There’s a powerful symbolism in using the same chip in devices that run on different Apple operating systems: MacOS and iOS. It’s a milestone in Apple’s journey to bring together the worlds of mobile and desktop computing. Apple has been inching toward this for years, an inevitable marriage taking longer than the courtship of Pam and Jim in The Office. At this stage, we’re seeing how iOS apps can run on Macintosh, but not vice versa. Some observers are impatient for a full consummation. One obstacle seems to be Apple’s refusal to employ touchscreens on Macintoshes. (I still hold to my contention that eventually it will cave.)

All that aside, it’s striking how much of Apple’s current innovation—and certainly its future innovation, which will involve augmented-reality glasses and maybe even cars—now hinges on homemade silicon. Even AirTags, Apple’s new little gadgets for finding lost items, are made possible by a custom chip. We once thought of Apple as a company defined by design. That form-as-function elegance is still there, as well as the eye candy—hey, they rolled out a purple iPhone! But right now, you can’t actually see Apple’s best designs, which are intricately imprinted with nano-thin silicon on wafers. Unless you crack open the case.

Time Travel

In January 2006, Apple introduced new versions of the iMac and MacBook Pro run by Intel’s Core Duo microprocessors. After his Macworld Expo keynote, I spoke to CEO Steve Jobs about the move to the new chip:

Steven Levy: You mentioned that Apple's 30th anniversary will be celebrated on April 1 this year. Isn't it ironic that this is the first time that Apple runs on Intel chips?

Steve Jobs: Things change in 30 years! I actually thought that the [original Apple's] 6502 was the best processor. That's not why we used it—we used it because Woz got one for free. I have to say I think Intel has really pulled ahead. This dual-core chip is just a screamer and yet we can build it into a notebook.

How will the speed of these machines compare to Windows machines?

You're asking a very interesting question, a software question. On the same hardware, what is the performance of Mac OS X plus Safari compared to Windows XP, plus Internet Explorer? You need to get the apps in native code [to judge], so I can't say definitively. But I think people will be surprised at how fast OS X is.

Your heavy-duty professional machine is the PowerMac, and it hasn't gotten its Intel transplant yet. Won't this kill sales in the meantime?

Yes and no. If you're an individual that's probably true, but if you're a business, you're thinking, "I've got someone who's going to use this four hours a day with Photoshop. Photoshop might not be available [in native code] until the spring or summer, and I need Photoshop native. So I better get one of those quad PowerMacs while they're still around."

Ask Me One Thing

Dan writes, “Whether Facebook is and acts as an ethical company is a settled question. My question is, what would it take for Facebook to remedy that, or at least what steps could it take?”

Thanks for the question, Dan. I doubt that Mark Zuckerberg would agree with your stipulation that Facebook is not an ethical company. But the FTC, the House of Representatives, and a number of ex-employees seem to be on your side. In my book about Facebook, I refrained from name-calling and tried to provide readers with evidence to make the judgment for themselves. But I think that even if your verdict is that the company is unethical, we have to consider the larger landscape. As a public company, Facebook’s fealty is to its shareholders above all. Like many companies, it publicly accepts responsibility for the well-being of its users, its employees and contractors, and society at large. There is an active debate about how corporations should balance these values. For quite a while, prioritizing profits, share price, or growth have seemed to rule. Even the conservative Business Roundtable has owned up to how much that approach sucks. However, when a company’s behavior is so dicey that legislators and regulators want to rein it in, the public wants to delete it, and employees aren’t proud to work there, smart leaders will change its behavior. That’s why we’re seeing things like the announcement Facebook made this week to try new ways to make the News Feed less toxic. Even if it’s a baby step.

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

End Times Chronicle

When Cyclone Seroja hit western Australia, it became one of only 26 storms in the past 5,000 years to go that far south. I guess it got bored after leveling Indonesia. Meanwhile, Cyclone Jobo is on track to be the first cyclone ever to hit Tanzania in modern times. In better news, the Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster is open for the season.

Last but Not Least

Here’s the complete run-down of what Apple announced at its spring event.

WIRED’s Lauren Goode weighs in on AirTags, a possible bridge to Apple’s ambitions in AR.

Can the hackers of broken ice cream machines drink McDonald’s milkshake?

And here’s a hack that lets you lurk in a Clubhouse room without people seeing you. No ice cream, though.

See you next week! Steven

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.