Apple has had great success developing ARM chipsets for its mobile devices and the latest generation now offers enough performance for desktop devices like laptops. ARM chipsets use a design approach called reduced instruction set computing (RISC) which is generally more efficient and uses less power than traditional desktop processors, such as those made by Intel. When this happens, the new Macs will share a similar architecture to iOS devices and will be able to natively run iPhone apps.Īpple has designed its own ARM-based processors for iPhone and iPad devices for years. In its place, Apple is creating its own chipset in much the same way it already does for iPhones, iPads, and other iOS and mobile devices. In an Apple developer conference earlier this year, Apple announced that it was going to stop building Macs with Intel-based CPUs. You'll soon be able to run iPhone apps on some Mac models iOS apps are designed using a fundamentally different architecture than Mac software, which means they're incompatible – Mac programs can't run on iPhones, and iPhone apps can't run on Macs. Your Mac isn't generally able to run apps from your iPhone.