The renaissance that Apple Inc. has been experiencing with the Mac — thanks in part to its specially designed chips — is set to receive a big boost with new, higher-end machines.
Full news wrap-up: Apple unveils new Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra chip, along with refreshed iPhone SE and iPad Air In calendar 2021, the company saw record unit shipments and revenue for the Mac . In Apple’s last fiscal year, Macs surpassed $30 billion for the first time, rising all the way to $35.2 billion in annual sales, up 23% from fiscal 2020. In the holiday season, Apple’s fiscal first quarter, Mac sales topped $10 billion in three months for the first time ever, and almost reached $11 billion.
Apple first launched the M1 — a chip it designed in-house, based on an Arm Holdings Ltd. core — in a fortuitous move at the end of 2020, just as the global supply chain was beginning to be constrained and semiconductors were suddenly in short supply. Apple has touted its chips’ power efficiency and its neural machine to accelerate machine learning, speeding up tasks like video, voice recognition and image processing.