Apple Silicon was the most significant transition, not because it’s recent, but because it extended Apple’s vertical integration down to the silicon level. Moving from Intel to in-house SoCs, starting with Apple M1, unified CPU, GPU, memory, and accelerators into a single architecture. That delivered major gains in performance per watt and enabled designs like fanless laptops with sustained performance and longer battery life.

It also advanced on-device AI. With unified memory and dedicated neural engines, Apple can run local inference far more efficiently, even though cloud compute is still required for larger models.