News from February 2021. Intel struck back at Apple with a new advertising campaign aimed at the M1-powered Mac line. The campaign took a dig at the M1's limitations and highlighted features that, in Intel's telling, were only possible on a Windows PC built around an Intel processor.
The campaign was posted on Intel's Twitter account on 2 February 2021 and on other platforms, and Intel also partnered with a YouTuber to argue the case for Windows over the Mac. You can see the original post here.
Key takeaways
- In early 2021 Intel answered Apple's move to its own M1 chips with a comparison campaign rather than a benchmark argument alone.
- The pitch focused on things the first M1 Macs did not offer, such as touch screens, 2-in-1 designs and a wide choice of games and hardware.
- The ad was a sign that the PC processor market had become a three-way contest between Intel, AMD and Apple's in-house Arm designs.
Why Intel ran the campaign
Apple began its transition from Intel x86 chips to its own Apple silicon in 2020. It announced the move at its developer conference in June 2020 and launched the first M1-powered machines, the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac mini, in November 2020. Apple had been one of Intel's best-known PC customers for about fifteen years, so the switch was both a lost account and a public statement that a custom Arm chip could beat a mainstream x86 laptop processor on performance per watt.
Early reviews of the M1 were strong on battery life and single-threaded speed. Intel could not easily win a straight efficiency argument at that time, so the campaign shifted the ground to choice, compatibility and form factor.
What the ads claimed
The slides and short videos in the campaign contrasted the M1 Macs with Windows laptops. As reported at the time, the points included:
- Touch screens and 2-in-1 designs: no M1 Mac offered a touch screen or a fold-back tablet mode.
- Gaming: Intel pointed to the much larger library of Windows games and to gaming laptops with discrete graphics.
- Displays and peripherals: the first M1 MacBooks drove one external display natively, while many Windows laptops could drive several.
- Choice of hardware: Windows PCs come from many makers at many price points, while Macs come from one.
Intel had also circulated its own benchmark slides comparing Core processors with the M1 around the same period. Those tests used Intel-chosen workloads, and several reviewers noted that the comparison conditions favoured Intel, so treat them as marketing rather than independent measurement.
Reading the campaign as an engineer
For a chip designer, the interesting part is not the ad itself but what it admitted. Intel chose to compete on platform features rather than on the processor's efficiency. That reflected a real gap in 2021: Apple's M1 was built on TSMC's 5 nm process while Intel's mainstream laptop parts were on its own 10 nm class process, and Apple controlled the whole stack from the chip to the operating system.
| Factor | Apple M1 Mac (late 2020) | Intel-based Windows laptop (early 2021) |
|---|---|---|
| Instruction set | Arm (Apple custom cores) | x86 |
| Process | TSMC 5 nm | Intel 10 nm class |
| Memory | Unified memory in the package | Separate DRAM, usually on the board |
| Form factors | Clamshell and desktop only | Clamshell, 2-in-1, touch, gaming and more |
| Software | macOS, with Rosetta 2 translating x86 apps | Windows with native x86 software |
What happened next
Intel followed this campaign in March 2021 with a wider "Go PC" series of ads. Apple went on to move the rest of the Mac range to its own chips, and completed the change with the Apple silicon Mac Pro in 2023. Intel, for its part, has since reworked its laptop processors around a hybrid core design and chiplet-style packaging. The 2021 exchange is now best read as an early marker of the shift from a two-vendor x86 PC market to one where custom Arm silicon is a serious option.
FAQ
When did Apple stop using Intel chips in Macs?
Apple announced the change in June 2020, shipped the first M1 Macs in November 2020, and finished moving the Mac range to Apple silicon in 2023.
Was the Intel campaign about performance?
Mostly not. It focused on features and choice, such as touch screens, 2-in-1 designs, games and multi-monitor support, rather than raw processor speed.
Where can I see the original ad?
Intel's post from 2 February 2021 is linked at the top of this article.
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