According to a former Intel, Apple decided to end its collaboration with the company due to bugs in the Skylake series of CPUs that powered Mac released between 2015 and 2017.
The engineer is François Piednoël, who now works at Mercedes-Benz R&D North America. Of course, this is just a guess from a former Intel employee, but Piednoël was one of the top CPU at the company.
Last week, Apple announced at WWDCthat it would be switching to Arm for its future Mac models. Piednoël, however, pointed to the issues faced by Skylake Core CPUs as the main reason Apple moved away from Intel.
“Basically, the poor quality assurance of Skylake is responsible for [forcing them] to move away from the platform,” Piednoël.
Of course, Apple's transition from Intel to Arm won't happen overnight. It will happen gradually over a two-year period, with the first Arm-based Mac models launching by the end of the year. Apple will continue to support Intel-based Macs for now.
However, Apple wasn't the only company to experience problems with Intel's Skylake. As Paul Thurrott reports, Intel's 6th-generation processors were at least partially responsible for reliability issues in the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4.
Microsoft faced a “disaster” in 2016 when NFL Patriots coach Bill Belichick broke his Surface during a game. He claimed the tablet was prone to malfunctioning. And while it’s not necessarily Intel’s fault and it didn’t say which Surface model he was using, the NFL Patriots were the ones promoting the Surface Pro 4 in 2016 .
