Apple also faces the same existential challenges as everyone else, including the impact of climate change and its already visible effect on crop yields, economic weakness in many markets, and increasing international tension eroding what has been a happy and mutually profitable relationship with China.

Any of these many problems is challenging in its own right, but together they represent a range of long-term threats to the future of the company.

Apple is no stranger to existential threat. Surviving these is core to the company’s own history, and the track record of triumph in adversity it possesses is second to few. But all these threats need a response, and once again Apple Silicon could turn out to be the wind beneath the company’s wings.

Move fast, make things

That Apple already plans M4 Macs isn’t terribly surprising. The cadence of its Mac processor upgrades seems to be around 12 to 18 months across the four processors in any M range (M-, M- Pro, M- Max, and M- Ultra). With each processor being around 20% improved on the previous generation, the company is making huge strides, setting industry expectations for computational performance and energy requirements for the chip price.

The processors also boast on-chip GPUs and Neural Engines, meaning that all existing Macs already have plenty of computational capability to pump into AI.

Apple Silicon isn’t just inside Macs, either. You also find it inside iPhones. We already anticipate Apple will field the world’s biggest personal AI ecosystem once it ships iOS 18 this fall, and there are claims the next iPhone will also deliver a big bump in computational performance.