Apple turns 50: How in-house chips reshaped its tech dominance

Apple turns 50 today. The big 5-0. That company from Cupertino, California is one of the biggest success stories in tech. It's built an empire from selling phones and laptops to people that have moustaches tattooed on their fingers and unironically wore suspenders in 2010. A mighty accomplishment.

Alright, I will lay off the sarcasm for Apple's big day, even if it is also April Fool's-arguably the worst day on the calendar. Even a PC gamer such as myself can admit what Apple has achieved in recent years is impressive. It's no longer selling Intel-powered laptops with fewer options at higher prices. It's selling homegrown, powerful Arm silicon with an OS and software stack that feels more in sync than Microsoft or anyone else could dream of.

It's easy for PC users to poke fun at Apple users: everyone's buying the same thing for the same high price. And Apple has done its fair share to reinforce that snarky relationship. In my mind, it was just a couple years ago-though, in fact, 20 years have passed-when the company lived rent free in PC owners' heads with the launch of its very popular adverts, known for the opening line, "I'm a Mac. I'm a PC." These painted PC users as snivelling dorks. At the very least I'm not snivelling.

But I've recently ditched Android in favour of iOS, if only to a) ditch Google, b) try something new, and c) get my hands on an A18 chip. I've even bought an iPad Mini since and am now enjoying the excellence that is the Apple Pencil Pro. Despite being a many-decades lapsed Apple user, and now running both Linux and Windows day-to-day, I like my Apple devices.

But forget Pencils, Apple's strongest feature, at least to a performance-obsessed PC gamer such as myself, is the silicon.

When it first announced the M1 chip in 2020, ditching a long-standing relationship with Intel in the process, I had feared the worst for Apple's ecosystem. Mobile applications do not replace desktop applications. Let alone mobile applications running on an Arm-based processor, which is what Apple's silicon is. But that line between mobile and desktop is thinning. No more so since the release of the MacBook Neo.

The MacBook Neo was well reviewed by our Ian Evenden. As by many more. It's an affordable laptop that's powered by a processor previously used in iPhones. It's not just a mobile chip in the sense that it's for laptops. It's literally a mobile phone chip. A mobile phone chip that's competitive with older M-series chips and shares similarities with the M4 chip, only smaller, and requiring only a cutesy motherboard. It's not something you could fathom on PC, but Apple can do it; made possible by the company's in-house chip design and total ownership of the silicon and software stack.