In 2020, Apple shares appreciated a remarkable 82.3% with dividends included. Even in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic, Apple earnings showed amazing resilience. As the year of COVID-19 lockdowns progressed, enthusiasm ramped up over a potential 5G “super-cycle” kicked in, propelling Apple’s stock price to new all-time highs. In a surprise, Apple split its stock 4-for-1 in August.
You’d think the iPhone 12 family would have been Apple’s biggest breakthrough in 2020, but it wasn’t.
Apple’s biggest breakthrough in 2020: The first Macs powered by Apple Silicon, the M1 MacBook Air, M1 MacBook Pro, and M1 Mac mini.
Billy Duberstein for The Motley Fool:
How did Apple achieve such a feat in unseating Intel, known as the gold standard for complex PC processors over the last two decades, and solely focused on leading chips? Part of the answer is that the M1 was 10 years in the making, and another is it had help from two key partners.
According to Twitter posts from Shac Ron, a former Apple engineer who worked on the project, not only did Apple coordinate with ARM, it actually helped ARM build its 64-bit custom instruction set architecture (ISA) even before ARM was done building it. “M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago.”
Second, ever since Apple has been designing its own chips, it used foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM) as its partner for highly complex manufacturing. Two years ago, Taiwan Semi surpassed Intel in terms of its manufacturing capability… The close partnership, with Apple as TSM’s prime star customer, is how Apple became the first company to market with 5nm chips, which pack a whopping 16 billion transistors on each M1.
MacDailyNews Take: The M1 was certainly Apple’s most momentous achievement and release in 2020!
See also: Qualcomm insider: Apple’s 64-bit A7 chip set off a panic, it ‘hit us in the gut’ – December 16, 2013
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