Apple Silicon transition may hit its two-year target with 2022 Mac Pro

On launching Apple Silicon, Apple advised it was on a tight two-year schedule to transition away from Intel processors to chips of its own designs. Given the first M1 Macs landed in November 2020, Apple has until November 2022 to stay on target.

In Sunday’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman believes Apple will “barely hit its two-year timeline” for Apple Silicon. While the time may be fairly tight, it also appears that Apple is preparing to complete some of the trickier and higher-performance launches towards the end of the period.

According to Gurman, “M1X” Macs are on the way in the “coming months,” possibly coinciding with Apple’s typical fall announcements. The rumored updated Mac mini will apparently arrive “soon after that.”

However, the main launch towards the end could be a new Mac Pro.

Expected to be smaller in size, roughly half that of the current Mac Pro, the Apple Silicon version is anticipated to use chips with higher core counts, possibly including 20-core and 40-core variants.

Gurman believes rumors about a final Intel Mac Pro are true, with one more apparently planned for launch. Rumors from July point to a Xeon W-3300 family CPU being used in an update, in parallel to Apple Silicon.