'Roll on Silicon Apple': Channel reacts as Apple dumps Intel

'When you look at the success of Apple Silicon in iPhone and iPad, this can only be good news for Mac,' says Roger Whittle, CEO of Jigsaw24

Apple's channel partners have backed its decision to freeze out long-time partner Intel and begin producing its own chips for its Mac devices.

In what Apple CEO Tim Cook branded "a historic day for the Mac", Apple yesterday announced it will transition the Mac to its custom silicon, with plans in place to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of the year.

The move ends a 14-year association with Intel, whose desktop chips it will now swap out for its own processors based on ARM designs - which it already uses in its iPhone and iPad.

"From the beginning, the Mac has always embraced big changes to stay at the forefront of personal computing. Today we're announcing our transition to Apple silicon, making this a historic day for the Mac," Cook said.

Roger Whittle, CEO of the UK's largest Apple reseller Jigsaw24, welcomed confirmation of the long-rumoured move at yesterday's virtual Worldwide Developers Conference.

"This is what we had been hoping for," he told CRN.

"When you look at the success of Apple Silicon in iPhone and iPad, this can only be good news for Mac, and to hear that both Adobe and Microsoft have already ported across Creative Cloud and Microsoft 365 is the icing on the cake for business customers... It sounds like Apple are moving with their impressive speed because they are already shipping their Apple Silicon Mac mini-based developer transition kits this week to developers.

"Silicon has been a huge success elsewhere - this is not untested technology - and so we're confident it'll be done right with Mac. Just look at the keynote last night - everything they showed, the demos and presentations had all been created and delivered on Silicon-based hardware.

"Roll on Apple Silicon - the quicker, the better!"

Andy Wright, commercial director at XMA, which resells Apple devices and also owns the Viglen brand, also backed the move.

"The timing is good as the world becomes less office based, and clearly Apple have spent a lot of time evaluating, testing and making sure that the solution will give its customers the price performance that they demand and expect," he said.

"We have seen a shift for lots of reasons in terms of the traditional AMD/Intel share of the mobile market and I think there is room for this approach as well. We must remember that that Apple have been powering the iPhone and iPad development and growth built on ARM technology."

Andy Rutley, managing director at system builder NS Optimum, saw the announcement as "confirmation of problems at Intel", which has recently seen its market lead eroded by arch-rival AMD, not to mention the emergence of ARM.

"Intel seem to be losing ground," Rutley said.

"We have noticed that AMD are gaining market share which seems to be as a result of availability. The MNC [multi-nationals] mobile devices seem to be around half and half between Intel and AMD whereas a few years ago it was as much as 90 per cent in Intel's favour. We are having to source Dell and HP Servers too as it takes so long to get all the components for an Intel server sourced and here so I guess that they are favouring the MNCs for supply of Xeon processors."