Apple wants to launch its first Mac with its own chip in 2021, says Bloomberg

“Kalamata”: Apple wants to launch its first Mac with its own chip in 2021, says Bloomberg

It’s been a long time since we heard rumors about a possible migration of Macs from Intel chips, which Apple has been using since 2005, to proprietary processors based on the architecture ARM. And by the way, this is now closer than ever.

While analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has determined that we should see the first Mac of its kind arriving between the end of this year and the beginning of the next, the Bloomberg today revealed in an extensive report that Apple’s goal is to start this transition sometime in 2021 – if the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) does not delay its plans, of course.

The project is known internally as «Kalamata» and it will probably start with some entry-level model (perhaps the MacBook Air?), while Apple’s engineering team is working on developing more powerful chips that will be able to equip MacBooks Pro, iMacs and even Macs Pro in the future.

The first own chip to equip a Mac will probably be based on the same “A14” design that will equip the iPhones launched this year, manufactured in a process of only 5 nanometers. THE Bloomberg says Apple is working on a model with 12 cores – 8 high-performance, 4 focused on energy efficiency. And it will be a system-on-a-chip (system-on-a-chip, or SoC) combining CPU and GPU, of course.

Comparatively, there are now MacBook Air models with only two cores (dual-core), and MacBooks Pro with four (quad-core). That is, right away Apple would be bringing chips with many more internal cores – and it plans to work on even more powerful models, of course. The manufacturing is expected to be the responsibility of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which a while ago stole most of Apple’s orders for chip making from Samsung.

The migration from Macs to chips with the same technology as iPhones and iPads should bring the two platforms even closer together, but the operating systems will remain independent. With the Mac Catalyst, launched last year, Apple started to allow apps to be easily ported from iPadOS to macOS, which perhaps means in the future a union of the two app and game stores.

If all of this is going forward, and considering that Apple this year will most likely return to using Qualcomm modems on iPhones, we are seeing the beginning of the end of a long partnership between Apple and Intel.