Sources: Apple is planning to use its own processors in Macs from 2020, replacing Intel; Intel stock closed down 6.07% yesterday
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 Bloomberg report was the earliest signal of what became a multi-year arc: developers and Intel officials themselves came to expect the move, with an ARM-based Mac anticipated as soon as 2020. Two years later, Apple confirmed the Arm-based shift at WWDC, validating the sourcing here.
The stakes for Intel are visible in the market reaction — a 6.07% single-day stock decline on the report — because Macs are a marquee design win, and losing one signals how much leverage Apple's custom-silicon program gives it over merchant chip suppliers.
First-order effects
- Intel immediately loses its highest-profile PC customer and the halo that comes with it, a loss the market priced at 6.07% in a single session.
- Apple gains control of its own Mac silicon roadmap, tying laptop and desktop chips to the same development pipeline as its iPhone processors.
Second-order effects
- TSMC, already Apple's sole chip supplier per the related coverage, captures the manufacturing volume Intel sheds — concentrating Apple's supply chain in one foundry.
- Intel is forced to reposition from guaranteed socket owner to supplicant: CEO Pat Gelsinger later launched Intel Foundry Services explicitly to pursue Apple as a foundry client, trying to win back revenue through manufacturing rather than chip design.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, PC differentiation migrates from the processor vendor to the platform owner, eroding the merchant-CPU model that sustained Intel and pushing other PC makers toward custom or semi-custom silicon.
- Apple's single-foundry dependence on TSMC becomes a structural vulnerability that reshapes foundry politics — exactly the gap Intel Foundry Services is built to fill as a second source.
The trend: Compute platforms are consolidating around vertically integrated custom silicon, forcing merchant chipmakers like Intel to compete for the same customers through foundry services instead of chip sockets.