It’s been a long while since Mac users had reason to get excited over a new chip. It’s not that Intel isn’t packing heat—just yesterday the first round of Coffee Lake laptop chips were unveiled with six cores and the promise of 5GHz speeds—but ever since Apple transitioned to x86 processors, cores and clock speeds don’t mean quite as much to the Mac as they once did.
Back when Macs ran on RISC processors, speed was the only thing that mattered. While the rest of the PC market had Intel inside, Apple’s computers had giant chips on their proverbial shoulders, as the Mac sought to convince Windows users that they were faster and more power efficient than their Pentium counterparts. Steve Jobs famously held bake-offs on stage to drive home that very point, and Mac users eagerly awaited each new update to see how much higher the bar would be raised.
