Apple Made a Massive Bet on Intel 21 Years Ago. It Changed Everything

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When Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage at WWDC 2005, few people knew he was about to reveal the fruits of a secret project five years in the making: Apple's switch to Intel processors across all its Mac systems.

The move was significant enough to be part of the cover story for our Aug. 9, 2005, print edition, a package called " The Big Shake-Up ." Apple's move away from PowerPC and its embrace of Intel processors could already be seen as a monumental event in the computer industry. 

What we did not know at the time was that the switch to Intel began as a project so secret that even Jobs himself didn't know about it for the first year or two. Spearheaded by Apple engineer JK Scheinberg, the project's clandestine nature has become part of Silicon Valley lore.

Project Marklar: Spinning Up Intel on Macs

In 2000, Apple started a one-off experiment that it dubbed Project Marklar. It was a skunkworks initiative to compile Mac OS X for Intel hardware, essentially creating the first Hackintosh . Software vice president Bertrand Serlet discovered the running build roughly 18 months in and immediately dispatched Scheinberg to Fry's Electronics to buy a top-of-the-line Sony Vaio PC.

Scheinberg had OS X running on it by that evening—just hours before Jobs famously pitched Kunitake Ando, Sony's then-president, on licensing Mac OS for Vaio laptops while presenting him with a Vaio running Apple's operating system. (The Vaio deal didn't happen, but Mac OS X on Intel sure did.)

At WWDC 2005, Jobs announced the switch from PowerPC to Intel, explaining Apple's hardware dilemma succinctly: "Apple just didn't know how to build the amazing computers we want to deliver in the future with the PowerPC." Jobs went on to explain that all Macs would be moving to Intel within two years.

The move not only kept Apple's laptop plans on track but also helped cement Intel's position as the world's dominant chipmaker for more than a decade.

The Strong Arm: Apple Silicon In, Intel Out

That's why it was such a big deal when Apple announced in 2020 that it was making another pivot: Apple was phasing out Intel chips in favor of the new Apple M1 family, a line of Apple-designed chips that would power forthcoming Mac laptops and desktops.

The introduction of the M1 was another sea change for both Apple and the broader PC industry. By then, Apple's ecosystem had grown to include the wildly popular iPhone and iPad. In 2020, Intel found itself divorced from this much bigger, brawnier Apple, while a second threat to its position emerged: The M1 opened the door to Arm processors on flagship PCs. That, in turn, paved the way for Qualcomm's current competitive place in the PC market and signaled the rise of the larger system-on-a-chip (SoC) paradigm that's reshaping the PC world today.

Apple's M1 chips immediately proved their worth, delivering superb performance-per-watt and enabling MacBooks with genuine all-day battery life. The M1 was impressive at its debut in late 2020, but the M1 Ultra, two years later, was a real revelation: It combined two M1 Max processors into a doubled-up superchip that was competitive with workstation hardware. The most recent M-series chip, the M5, came out last year.

In a fascinating twist of fate, Apple's shift to a larger SoC architecture, paired with massive allotments of unified memory shared among CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, also positioned it to become the leading platform for the first wave of AI agents. By providing immense memory bandwidth on local hardware, the machines were uniquely suited early on to running on-device AI models.

After six years of M-series chips, the last of the Intel-based Macs are losing support. The upcoming release of macOS 27 ("Golden Gate") will drop support for Intel processors, making macOS 26 ("Tahoe") the final Mac operating system for x86 hardware. Legacy Intel-based machines are already missing out on current features, such as support for Metal 4 graphics and Apple Intelligence, and they are facing the end of security patches and of Apple-authorized physical repairs. It's officially sunset for Intel Macs . The future belongs to Apple silicon.

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