Will next year’s iPads be faster than Macs?

Apple has added support for an ARM chip to macOS Sierra, igniting another wave of speculation that it may ship ARM-powered Macs to complement its ARM-powered iOS devices.

Hurricane

The kernel release notes for macOS 10.12 tells us that the OS now supports a new ARM chip family, code-named ‘Hurricane’. This is likely to be a new Apple-designed processor, given that the A7 was called Cyclone, the A8, Typhoon and the A9-series Apple chip was called Twister.

This support in conjunction with Apple’s decision to cleanse apps running legacy code from the App Store is setting thoughts in motion. Techtastic observes: “Apple can easily make the transition to a different instruction set, for example, switching from x86 to ARM without all apps need to be resubmitted.”

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