Why Apple Sold ARM

Apple's best creation isn't the iPhone, the iPod or the Mac. It's something most people have never heard of, and Apple doesn't even own it anymore. Fresh off presenting at the inaugural AI on Apple community event in Sydney (oversubscribed two to one, with speakers from Apple, Salesforce and SpaceX), I unpack the story behind the technology quietly powering Apple's on-device AI advantage: ARM. In 1990 Apple co-founded Advanced RISC Machines to power the Newton, then sold its stake in the late 90s to help survive. Years later, after Intel passed on the iPhone and stalled on manufacturing, Apple came back to ARM, first for the iPhone and then for the Mac with the M1. That bet made possible the chip designs behind unified memory, where the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine share one pool of memory, and it's why local AI on Apple Silicon is fast, private and cheap while the rest of the industry chases ever-bigger cloud models. It's a story about complacency, competition, and why AI is more than frontier models.