Apple designs its own chips but has never owned a factory to make them
Every Apple chip, from the iPhone's processor to the M1 that moved the Mac off Intel, is designed in-house and built by someone else, first Samsung and later TSMC. Apple even sells flawed chips on purpose, switching off a faulty graphics core and fitting the part into a cheaper model.
It began with the A4 in 2010, the first system on a chip Apple designed itself, which debuted in the original iPad and then powered the iPhone 4. Samsung made it on a 45-nanometre process, pairing an ARM Cortex-A8 core nicknamed Hummingbird with PowerVR graphics. The same chip ran at 1 GHz in the iPad but only 800 MHz in the phone.
Each generation shrank the circuitry and swelled the ambitions. The A6 of 2012, launched with the iPhone 5, used Swift, Apple's first custom processor core in place of one licensed from ARM. The A7 in the iPhone 5S of September 2013 was the first 64-bit chip in any smartphone, packed over a billion transistors and added a Secure Enclave to guard Touch ID fingerprint data. With the A8 in 2014, TSMC took over manufacturing, doubling the transistor count to 2 billion on a die 13% smaller.
At its 2020 developer conference Apple announced it would move the Mac to its own designs and gave the family its name. The first M1 Macs were unveiled on 10 November 2020, and by June 2023 the whole Mac range had switched. Apple silicon now runs nearly everything the company sells, including Apple Watch, AirPods, AirTag and Vision Pro.
Binning keeps costs down. A chip with a defective graphics core has that core disabled and becomes a lower-tier part, which is why some entry-level MacBook Air models ship with one or two fewer GPU cores, and why the iPhone 17e uses a trimmed-down A19.
Source: Apple silicon
