Success arouses desires – also at Apple. Within a short time, the US group now has to cope with the departure of another important employee. These are not good signs for the future of the Mac division.
Superlatives are used excessively in the technology world. It feels like every second launch is accompanied by phrases like “revolutionary” or “will change everything”. Even Apple is not free from this bad habit. The presentation of the M1 chip at the end of 2020 can actually be described as a revolution. No other processor has so far managed to reconcile performance and energy efficiency. The competition reacts to the new competitor in their own unique way.
Apple is losing another key employee to competition
After Jeff Wilcox recently left Apple in the direction of Intel, he is now apparently in place departure of another top-class employee: Mike Filippo. He should hire Microsoft and take care of the development of his own chips for Microsoft’s cloud division Azure, as Bloomberg reports.
Products for end customers are probably not to be expected in the job description. So if you’re hoping for a Surface Pro that challenges the performance and battery life of current MacBook models with its own Microsoft chip, you’ll likely be disappointed.
Filippo has worked for the iPhone manufacturer since 2019 and is responsible for chip development there. Before that, the engineer was at ARM for over a decade and before that at Intel.
Apple recently presented stronger versions of the M1:
Punch in the gut for Apple
The departure is another hard blow for Apple, after Jeff Wilcox recently left the company and will work at Intel as “Design Engineering Group CTO”. The success of the M1 chip and the recently introduced releases M1 Pro and M1 Max arouses the desires of the competition. It remains to be seen to what extent this will affect the medium and long-term planning of the Mac division. But these are not good signs.