For years we have been hearing that Apple intends to end its partnership with Intel, so far nothing has come true, but things have been going in this direction for some time. Recently the Apple company made some internal changes, and Bob Mansfield, the man who deals with the development of hardware at Apple, was appointed the head of the Technologies division. This division was formed at the end of last month and one of its roles is to develop chips to replace the Intel processors used by Apple in Macs.
Apple engineers have grown confident that the chip designs used for its mobile devices will one day be powerful enough to run its desktops and laptops. While Apple is now committed to Intel in computers and is unlikely to switch in the next few years, some engineers say a shift to its own designs is inevitable as the features of mobile devices and PCs become more similar. Semiconductor development was part of Apple's management overhaul announced Oct. 29. Chip research is being led by Bob Mansfield, whom Cook put in charge of a new group called Technologies. In the statement announcing the leadership changes, Apple said that its semiconductor teams have "ambitious plans for the future."
Apple has been using Intel processors for 7 years and will continue to do so, but at some point will make the transition to our own chips, developed by our own engineers and built by a partner. Apple does this with iDevices and has proven to be extremely good at it, and in the case of Macs things will probably be identical. At the beginning there is a possibility that Apple will not be able to offer everything that Intel offers, but with time the performance of Macs will become at least as good as those of computers with Intel processors, and looking at the current iDevices and Android terminals we we can make an idea about what will happen in the future.
