On June 22nd, 2020, the U.S. Technology Company, Apple, held its worldwide developers conference, an event at which they typically lay out some details about next steps, especially in terms of what folks who make software and accessories for their products can expect in the coming years, along with more broadly applicable updates about new operating system functionality, user interface upgrades,

and the like.

At this particular WWDC, the Apple higher-ups confirmed a rumor that had been shuffling around

the tech news circuit for quite a while, but which had been up till that point a bit uncertain.

Apple announced that they intended to shift their Mac computer hardware

away from Intel chips to instead utilize their own arm-based designs, Arm being another chip

designer. This is similar to the move they made back in 2006 when they dumped power PC processors, which was a type of processor architecture,

co-developed by Apple, IBM, and Motorola, in favor of Intel chips, which were the default

for the rest of the personal computer industry at that point. But Apple had stubbornly stuck

with their outsider format until it became clear that their architecture

lacked a competitive future, while Intel was blazing ahead, which made Windows-based machines

more powerful than Macs, both in that moment, and if they didn't change over time, it was

suspected for the foreseeable future as well. This latest move is similar to that previous one, and that Apple found itself staring

down the barrel of a future diminishment in their ability to compete, and thus decided to make

a costly, difficult, and time-consuming shift to another chip architecture, which back then, and with this

new changeover, will require changes to most of the software that runs on Mac devices,

creating no small amount of difficulty for developers, though that difficulty seems to be

perceived as a necessary sacrifice by the folks at Apple. In this new 2020-era case,

Apple already has the next architecture, or the general framework for it, at least, in place.

They've been using custom-designed chips in their mobile products since the iPad and iPhone

4 were released back in 2010. The A4 processor in those

devices were the first Apple designed chips, based on designs licensed from the aforementioned

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