Apple Working on New 'Specialised' Chips: Report

Apple is working on new chips for its upcoming smart wearable glasses, ‘more powerful’ Macs, and AI servers, according to a Bloomberg report. This indicates progress from the company to compete with Meta’s Ray-Ban smart wearable glasses. 

The Cupertino tech giant is likely to begin mass production of these chips by the end of next year, or in 2027. 

The report further indicates that the processor designated for these glasses is derived from those used in the Apple Watch, necessitating less energy compared to those found in the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. 

Furthermore, the AI server chips will be designed to process tasks related to Apple Intelligence, which will then be sent to the users’ devices. This signifies yet another attempt to improve Apple Intelligence, which has been subjected to significant criticism over the last few months. 

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior VP of services, revealed that the company plans to integrate AI search in Safari, powered by either Perplexity, Google or OpenAI. Sundar Pichai also revealed that Google is planning to strike a deal with Apple to integrate Gemini into Apple Intelligence this year. 

CEO Tim Cook, in an interaction with Pichai, said that ‘more third-party AI models’ would ship to Apple Intelligence this year.

This will add to the company’s efforts to build powerful, in-house hardware systems, building on the success of the Arm architecture M series chips released a few years ago, which were hailed for exceptional performance and power efficiency.

The company recently unveiled its first ‘custom-designed’ modem chip, as a part of the C1 subsystem integrated in the iPhone 16e. The move is set to reduce the company’s reliance on Qualcomm. 

Recent reports also claimed that Apple plans to integrate cameras into Apple Watch and AirPods. The cameras would help the devices visually observe the user’s environment and use AI to deliver appropriate information.