With the MacBook Neo, Apple’s A-series chips have made a full return to the Mac product lineup, completing a long journey from experimental devices to mature, finished products.
The Apple Silicon era on the Mac platform began with an iPad chip, and now the MacBook Neo takes it one step further by adopting a chip originally designed for the iPhone.
Since 2020, every Mac — from the entry-level Mac mini to the high-performance Mac Studio — has used an M-series chip. The M1 was Apple’s first ARM chip designed specifically for the Mac, and it led the company’s transition away from Intel. However, it was not the beginning of Apple’s chip transformation.
The roots of Apple’s chips can be traced back more than 35 years, to the very birth of the ARM architecture. Apple played a key role in the founding, financing, and engineering of ARM by co-founding a joint venture with Acorn Computers and VLSI Technology. In November 1990, Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) was officially established.