Apple is finally dropping Intel — developers can too

Apple has made it simpler for Mac developers to cut Intel support. The company's announcement means the tooling now treats arm64 as the default path. If your app only runs on Apple Silicon, you can skip the Intel slice entirely. The shift is the kind of quiet infrastructure change that only shows up when you're trying to compile something and it fails.

This is the third act of a long arc. Apple moved to its own chips in 2020. By 2022 they'd stopped shipping Intel Macs. Now the developer tools are catching up — and the message to the rest of the industry is clear: the old x86 era is closing. For a lot of people writing software for Mac, that means rechecking dependencies, retesting on M-series chips, and accepting that the universal binaries of the past are a thing of the past.

Why this matters for us: the shift away from Intel changes the hardware everyone builds on, and the ones who plan early save time and avoid the rush when the change lands.