Mac to the future

Apple is at a turning point with Mac hardware — but just where could it go in the next five or 10 years? Let’s imagine…

WRITTEN BY ALEX COX

Future Macs could come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, including the G4 Cube–like Mac Pro mini.

APPLE SILICON HAS changed the game. It’s not Apple’s first big platform change — while it seems silly to include the 6502, the Mac has seen 68000, PowerPC and X86 chips before the M1 — but it is the most significant in, if not the Mac’s lifespan, at least a generation. The ARM64–based Apple silicon is a more flexible and more versatile system–on–a–chip (SoC) processor and, crucially, it’s Apple designed...

A “MacPad” could team an iPad–like tablet with a keyboard/battery base for extra oomph when you’re deskbound.

The M1 chip provides superior performance with in–house Apple silicon advances.

If there’s one thing Apple treasures above all else, it’s control over its own platforms. Apple silicon, starting with the M1 chip, gives the company precisely that — an almost entirely closed shop.

The MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, and most recently, the iMac (p38) have gone the route of the M1. The rumour mill suggests the Mac Pro (already behind M1 laptops in terms of rendering power) will get its refresh in 2022, with a Mac Pro mini also anticipated. What happens after that? Apple has never been afraid of radical innovation, so why shouldn’t now be the jumping off point for a new generation of Mac hardware? There’s a lot to be learned from the changing direction of the PC, and much to be gained from incorporating mobile innovations.

Let’s dust off the (admittedly rather scuffed) Mac|Life crystal ball and look at what we’d like to see in the world of Mac. Real–world rumors swirl about a future MacBook with a completely non–mechanical keyboard, no scissor or butterfly switches, just a flat expanse of touch–sensitive nothing. This sounds, frankly, like a horrible idea, so let’s start our journey into this imagined future with something better: the MacBook Touch, a laptop which puts fingers first.