Computer-specific features like Thunderbolt, external displays and better GPUs needed something bespoke.

“The M1 is essentially a superset, if you want to think of it relative to A14,” Federighi said. One interesting tidbit, for example, is that Apple was never considering simply transplanting the chipset used in iPhones and iPads to Mac. The interview also covers the genesis of Apple Silicon and how it came about. “If you buy an Intel Mac today, or if you already own one, you're going to continue – just as you would have expected – getting free macOS upgrades for years to come,” he added. In other words, any macOS update will work on both systems. It's a single project, and that will continue to be the case.' It's the same OS we're building every night. “There's not the version of macOS for M1-based Macs and a different version of macOS for intel. “From a software point of view, we haven't created a branch of macOS,” Federighi explained. If you can’t live without Windows on your Mac, the good news is that Apple has no plans to abandon support for its existing Intel based hardware. But the Macs are certainly very capable of it.” “But that's a decision Microsoft has to make, to bring to license that technology for users to run on these Macs. “We have the core technologies for them to do that, to run their ARM version of Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications,” he continued. “That is really up to Microsoft,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told Ars Technica. Now Apple has made it quite clear that when it comes to future Windows support on Apple Silicon Macs, the ball is firmly in Microsoft’s court. When asked if this might change, the company would only tell The Verge that it has “nothing further to share at this time,” which doesn’t sound hugely promising. That’s thanks to a licensing issue, with Microsoft only allowing OEMs, rather than consumers, to install Windows 10 for ARM. Apple Silicon M1 powered Macs are here, and early reviews of the MacBook Air with M1 are very positive, with benchmarks matching everything Apple promised at the launch.īut there is a drawback for those not completely ensconced in the macOS ecosystem: Windows support via Bootcamp has gone.

Why can macs run windows