Apple Silicon's Win Is Now Official: Intel's 20-Year PC Era Is Over
The Intel Mac's quiet end marks a clean inflection point that reshapes who controls edge-inference silicon going forward.
6. Apple Silicon's Win Is Now Official: Intel's 20-Year PC Era Is Over
Apple began shipping Intel-based Macs in January 2006, replacing the PowerPC architecture that had defined the platform for over a decade. For nearly 20 years, Intel supplied the processors powering every MacBook, iMac, and Mac Pro. The transition ended in November 2020 when Apple introduced the M1 chip on Apple Silicon, and by mid-2023 the last Intel Mac configurations had been retired from the product line. As of June 2026, Ars Technica is running retrospectives on the era. The Intel Mac is now a closed chapter, not a product category.
That closure matters strategically beyond nostalgia. Intel's loss of Apple as a customer was not just a revenue event. It was a proof-of-concept that ARM-based, vertically integrated silicon could beat x86 on performance-per-watt at the high end of consumer hardware. That proof changed the competitive landscape for edge inference. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, Microsoft's Copilot+ PC push, and every on-device AI acceleration story of 2024 and 2025 borrowed credibility from Apple's M-series results. Intel's Core Ultra line is now playing catch-up in a category Apple redefined. AMD benefits from x86 loyalty in enterprise but faces the same structural question: who controls the silicon stack controls the inference experience.
The longer arc here is about where AI workloads run. Cloud inference is expensive and latency-constrained. On-device inference is fast and private, but it requires purpose-built silicon. Apple's M-series chips gave developers a reference point for what unified memory architecture could do for local model execution. The next move to watch is whether Intel's Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake successors can close the neural processing unit gap, or whether Qualcomm consolidates the Windows-side on-device AI market before Intel answers. Apple has already moved on to M4. The gap is not incremental.
Source: 20 years of Intel Macs: Why Apple switched, and why it switched again