It Barely Matters That Apple Missed Its Two-Year Goal for the Apple Silicon Transition ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

If you view the November [2020] announcement [of the first M1 Macs] as the start of the transition process, Apple would have needed to have everything wrapped up by November 2022. This deadline, too, has passed. This means Apple has missed its two-year transition target regardless of which deadline you consider.

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So that leaves us where we are today. You have Apple Silicon options for every product category in the Mac lineup, with the exception of the Mac Pro. During its March event, Apple exec John Ternus teased that the Mac Pro with Apple Silicon was an announcement “for another day.” That day, however, hasn’t yet come.

Miller also notes that an Intel version of the Mac Mini remains available. But it hardly matters for Apple to have technically missed its goal since all of its mainstream Macs have transitioned to its own silicon, and it has released an entirely new Mac — in the form of the Mac Studio — and begun the rollout of its second generation of chips in that timeframe. Also, it sure helps that people love these new Macs.

Update: The December 18 version of Mark Gurman’s newsletter contains more details about the forthcoming Mac Pro:

An M2 Extreme [Gurman’s own term for two M2 Ultras] chip would have doubled that to 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores. But here’s the bad news: The company has likely scrapped that higher-end configuration, which may disappoint Apple’s most demanding users — the photographers, editors and programmers who prize that kind of computing power.

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Instead, the Mac Pro is expected to rely on a new-generation M2 Ultra chip (rather than the M1 Ultra) and will retain one of its hallmark features: easy expandability for additional memory, storage and other components.

I am interested to see how this works in practice. One of the trademarks of Macs based on Apple’s silicon is the deep integration of all these components, ostensibly for performance reasons.