Apple has a two-year transition plan to move its entire Mac lineup over to Apple silicon. It was always likely that its Pro level workstation would be the last machine to make that transition. Today’s report from wccftech would seem to confirm that.
According to the report, Apple may be planning to use the Xeon W-3300 Ice Lake chip that Intel is due to release later this year. A known Intel supply chain leaker YuuKi_AnS shared the information and has a decent track record of leak accuracy.
Other rumours have suggested Apple is working on a smaller, compact Pro level workstation based on Apple silicon. I imagine that to still be the case. Apple however also knows very well that some workflows will require x86 support in the pro-market for a while longer. Particularly folks that need to run Windows natively on their Mac.
Microsoft for its part plans to release an ARM-compatible version of Windows and already has a beta release. This would allow Apple to bring back boot camp to Mac products running on Apple silicon. When that will happen however is anyone’s guess. Virtualisation solutions do exist of course but aren’t reliable enough for some use cases.
It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out!
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Image credits: Nana Dua via Unsplash