There is a long list of reasons why Apple’s jump to its own home-grown silicon for Mac was a good thing, from blistering performance improvements to battery efficiency just not seen elsewhere in mobile computing. From the early days of M1 through to the current wave of Mac Mini M2 Max and Pro machines, I’m consistently blown away by what Apple’s pulled off since waving goodbye to Intel chipsets.
But one of the more underrated effects of making that transition was unifying Apple’s disparate app offerings, allowing many iPhone apps and iPad apps to work universally alongside Mac apps on desktop and laptop devices, too. Where once you may have had to juggle multiple devices to get access to a specific iPhone or iPad app that didn’t have a Mac equivalent, Apple’s simple compatibility layer made a huge number of iOS and iPadOS apps work on Mac without the developers having to even lift a finger.
