In 2008, when Apple acquired a semiconductor startup called P.A. Semi, I asked Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO at the time, why he would bother buying a chip company. “We’ve got some cool stuff we’re going to do,” he told me, then a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.
On Monday, more than 12 years after that conversation, the last major piece of the chip ambitions that Jobs hinted at fell into place. The company announced that by the end of this year, Apple will begin shipping Mac computers that run on in-house-designed silicon chips. The process of shifting to those chips—Apple said will take two years to sweep through its entire computer lineup—means the Mac will have the same silicon underpinnings as the iPhone and iPad, both of which run on Apple-designed chips.
