Apple Executives Talk About M2 Chips, Mac Gaming, Intel, and Other Topics

Tim Millet, vice president of platform architecture at Apple, and Bob Borchers, vice president of product marketing, spoke with TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino about the new hardware, the company’s move away from Intel, the future of gaming on the Mac, and other topics following the introduction of the Mac mini and the MacBook Pro with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips.

According to Millet, Apple did not want to establish a precedent of a few percentage points of gain with each new chip generation with the follow up to the M1 chip line. According to Borchers, Apple is able to integrate silicon, software, and hardware without the help of outside vendors because it has moved the design of the Mac chip in-house.

According to Borchers, Apple believes that gaming on the Mac is getting better with each new M-series chip release. Even though Apple is taking a “long view” on making the Mac into a gaming platform, work on it started back in the early days of the Apple silicon transition, according to Millet. Apple intends to keep looking at chip configurations and components through a gaming lens.

And I don’t think we’ll fool anyone by claiming that we’ll transform the Mac into a fantastic gaming platform overnight.