A report from the Wall Street Journal (via Yahoo Finance) says that Apple and Intel have entered a preliminary partnership agreement. This partnership would see Apple using Intel’s foundry services for building some of its chips, and would help Apple reduce some of its dependency on TSMC.

In December 2025, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that the plan was to leverage Intel for building the lower-end, base M-Series chips (think M4, M5) that are used in products like the MacBook Air and iPad Pro. He also went on to claim that the first Apple product using an Intel made chip under this agreement will arrive in 2027.

This lines up pretty well with the iPad Pro’s standard 18-month refresh cycle, with the product’s last update coming in October of 2025. That puts the next iPad Pro refresh around April or May 2027 with the forthcoming M6 chip.

Wait, Doesn’t Intel Suck? Isn’t That Why Apple Moved To Designing Their Own Chips?

It’s funny…I find some Apple fans have a perception of Intel that’s stuck in the mid-2010s. This is no longer the company that was building chips that ran so hot they had to be throttled in the impressively thin TouchBar MacBook Pros. Today, they are producing silicon and more importantly have chip building capabilities that are competitive with the leaders in the industry.

Intel has invested billions of dollars in recent years in building out its Foundry capabilities. And while they aren’t beating TSMC’s leading edge technology, they are at least part of the conversation again.

The company’s 18A process node technically beat TSMC to 2nm volume production, but TSMC’s process supports higher density chips than what Intel can produce.

To me, the point isn’t that Intel is the best, it’s more that it’s good enough that if Apple does start using them to produce chips for iPads and Macs, they aren’t putting those products at a competitive disadvantage. And since Apple will be designing the chips instead of using Intel’s IP, this is really the most important part.

Intel Has a Lot of Chips To Choose From

At this point, all of the information about what chips Intel would build for Apple is speculative. It’s possible Intel starts building something other than M-Series chips. Apple designs a lot more chips these days.

Chip	Functionality
A-series (e.g. A18)	SoC for iPhone and iPad
M-series (e.g. M5)	SoC for iPad and Mac
S-series (e.g. S10)	Apple Watch SIP (System In Package)
W-series (e.g. W2)	Bluetooth, Wi-Fi for Apple Watch
H-series (H1, H2)	Low-latency audio processing, Active Noise Cancellation, Transparency mode
U-Series (U1, U2)	Ultra-wideband spatial awareness and precise device location for AirDrop, AirTag, Find My
R1	Vision Pro real-time coprocessor for camera, sensor, and mic input
C1 / C1X	LTE/5G connectivity
N1	Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip

It’s likely Apple would start slow with this Intel partnership, using them for lower volume chips and products. Maybe Apple Watch chips, or some older A-Series chips like the A16 chip in the current standard iPad?

How Could This Affect The Next iPad Pro?

Unlike when Apple was using Intel chips in the Mac line, this time, Intel would just be providing its foundry services. The chips will still be designed by Apple, which means, in theory, they should perform just as well as chips that TSMC would build. Should.

Of course, we have seen this story before, so it might not necessarily be true. In what was obnoxiously dubbed “chipgate”, there was a controversy where A9 chips that were built by Samsung were found to perform worse than A9 chips that TSMC built in the iPhone 6S, even though the Samsung chips were on a more advanced manufacturing process. To be fair, real-world testing showed the gap was modest for most users, only becoming meaningful under sustained heavy load.

If Apple ends up sourcing all of the low-end M-Series chips from Intel, then this is a non-issue. But if they are dual sourced with TSMC, we could see slight variations in performance or thermals between different iPad Pros in the same family.

Conclusion

It’s ultimately too early to know where this supposed Intel and Apple partnership is going to start, but it stands to reason that the iPad Pro, as a relatively low volume product, would be a good candidate. As long as Apple continues to design efficient and powerful chips and chooses to use one of Intel’s more competitive process nodes, this will likely be a non-issue — even if the chip ends up being dual sourced with TSMC.