Not so long ago, the Mac was in a truly dire state — then Apple silicon arrived and completely reinvented the computer.
With its destiny back in its own hands, no longer shackled to Intel, Apple showed what it could really do: deliver computing magic on a dependable, annual cycle across the entire lineup.
As the original Apple silicon Macs turn five on 17 November, it’s worth reflecting on how the last half-decade has transformed the Mac.
The Mac was in real trouble
The iPhone may be Apple’s financial powerhouse, but for those of us who learned our craft — and earn our living — on the Mac, the company’s laptops and desktops remain its beating heart. Which made the Mac’s fall from grace all the more painful. A few years ago, prosumers found themselves with almost no good options at all.
Then came the M-series chips. Reviewers could hardly believe the leap in power and efficiency. Overnight, the Mac went from embattled to unbeatable.
Intel’s decline in the 2010s hit the Mac particularly hard. Apple depended entirely on Intel chips that barely improved for a decade, ran too hot and consumed too much power. Nearly every Mac in the lineup had become something to avoid.
How bleak things looked in November 2017
- The MacBook Air hadn’t had a meaningful update in more than two years and still lacked a Retina display.
- The 12-inch MacBook had received its final update — still too hot and too slow, with just one USB-C port and a butterfly keyboard already showing flaws.
- The Mac mini hadn’t been refreshed in three years and was four Intel generations behind.
- The base iMac still shipped with a spinning hard drive and a non-Retina 21.5-inch screen. Is your iMac running slow? Call us on 0200 888 1984 for the best SSD upgrade offer in London!
- The iMac Pro was weeks from launch, but after release would go over three years without a single update.
- The cylindrical Mac Pro had been untouched for nearly four years, stuck in a thermal dead end.
- Only the MacBook Pro received regular updates — minor at best — while persisting with the unreliable butterfly keyboard, the unloved Touch Bar and a lack of HDMI, SD card slots and MagSafe.
A new golden age
Thankfully, Apple silicon changed everything. The 2020 arrival of the M1 chip marked an astonishing turnaround, and each subsequent M-series generation has delivered industry-leading performance. Even a “slow” year like the M5 brings CPU gains we’d have celebrated in the Intel era.
Every MacBook Air and Pro gets every new chip, bringing extraordinary battery life and thoughtfully balanced designs. Desktop Macs occasionally skip a generation, but fears of the Mac being left behind are long gone — and Apple even added a new desktop, the Mac Studio.
Every Apple silicon Mac is a good Mac
There’s no longer any fear of buying the “wrong” Mac. Base models offer exceptional value, with no need for warnings about inadequate memory or weak processors.
If anything, most people now have more power than they’ll ever need. With so much work moving to the web, few truly require a 10-core CPU, 153GB/s memory bandwidth or Thunderbolt 5. Rumour has it Apple may soon release its cheapest MacBook yet to address exactly this.
The one exception: the Mac Pro
The only remaining outlier is the Mac Pro. The Ultra chip seems to be the ceiling for Apple’s current fabrication approach, and making something larger would be prohibitively expensive for a low-volume product. As a result, the Mac Pro is effectively a pricier Mac Studio with expansion slots that can’t take GPUs.
Hope for the future: wafer-level multi-chip modules
There is, however, hope. The next major step in chip fabrication — wafer-level multi-chip modules (WMCMs) — could let Apple scale its designs far more easily. Instead of building a massive monolithic chip, Apple could manufacture smaller CPU, GPU and Neural Engine blocks and link them together, much like the Ultra Fusion system but more granular.
With that, Apple could finally push the Mac Pro to new heights, taking full advantage of its large case, advanced cooling and enormous power capacity. If a MacBook Pro can render 8K ProRes video silently on battery power, imagine what a tower with many times the cores and airflow could achieve. There’s even a wealthy new audience eager to exploit its unified memory architecture.
The biggest revolution since the last one
This isn’t the first time the Mac has undergone a fundamental rebirth. The last major turning point came with the launch of Mac OS X on 24 March 2001. In the mid-to-late ’90s, classic Mac OS was creaking while Windows 95 conquered the world. Mac OS X, built on a solid UNIX foundation, carried Apple into the 21st century and underpins every OS the company ships today.
The parallels are clear. Just as Apple rebuilt its software platform two decades ago, it has now rebuilt its hardware foundation for the future.
The Mac’s resurgence over the last five years has been extraordinary. And as Apple works to bring even more chip technologies in-house — from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to cellular modems — there’s plenty more to look forward to.
