Apple introduced the first Macs with their own Apple silicon.
Apple is a company that has always preferred to have absolute control over their own systems. Sometimes this has been seen as bad for users because it might prevent them from having the liberty to modify the software on their devices in the way they prefer. This was especially true for the iOS devices and it explains why the "jailbreak" trend was so common for so many years.
On the other hand, having a single company in control of the software and hardware allows them to deliver top-notch performance and integration which results in a satisfactory experience when customers use these products. Tim Cook always boasts in their presentations about how their products are always #1 in customer satisfaction.
Apple has been developing their own chips for many of its devices throughout the last several years but their Macs have been using Intel processors ever since their transition in 2006 from PowerPC to Intel. It has been a long time rumor that Apple was working on developing their own processors for their Macs and it was finally confirmed this past June.
Yesterday was the day when they finally unveiled the new Macs with their own Apple Silicon. Right now, there 3 models: The MacBook Air, the MacMini, and the MacBook Pro. The complete transition will take around 2 years but it is clear they will stop using Intel chips in the near future.
In order to avoid users suffering from incompatibilities in certain Intel-based apps that aren't ported to the new system, they developed an emulator called "Rosetta 2" that will allow these apps to run in Macs with Apple silicon, so it is not like the old apps aren't going to run in the new chips. In fact, they even say the apps will run faster but I think this has yet to be proved.
This enormous change will have different benefits for the Apple ecosystem, one of which is that the integration between iOS and macOS will be now even deeper than before as both systems will have chips that use the same architecture. In the presentation, they also inform about several technicalities such as the use of 4 low-performance cores and 4 high-performance ones, their unified memory usage, and how everything will result in a general performance that will be much better than everything else. I don't think this level of vertical integration has ever existed before and this must surely be very exciting times for Apple.
Apple has not just surpassed Sony with the iPod, Nokia with the iPhone, Microsoft with the popularity of its iOS devices, but now they are also surpassing Intel and producing their own top of the line chips.
I wonder what do you think about this big change coming from Apple?