Apple Silicon is still the real star of WWDC. The company’s Vision Pro headset may be grabbing most of the attention, but enterprise professionals will recognize that Apple’s chips have enabled the company to explore new forms of computing, including eyewear.

“We view Apple Silicon is a key differentiator for Apple in the PC market and believe it can help accelerate PC market share gains,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring in a note to clients shared after the event.

The analyst, who correctly identified that Apple would not ship its new Vision Pro headset until December at the earliest, noted that Macs running these processors are picking up market share.

“Case in point — as of 1Q23, Apple has ~10% TTM PC unit share, but that is up 2.5 points in 9 quarters, from just ~7.5% share before Apple transitioned to Apple Silicon in 4Q20,” he explained.

In other words, the company continues to steadily build additional market share on the back of Apple Silicon.

It’s not terribly hard to figure out why.

People like Macs, recommend Macs, and want to use them at work as well as at home. It means that while Mac sales have declined in recent months, PC sales have declined more, meaning that Apple continues to build up market share in most geographies.

But Apple Silicon has proved a huge catalyst for further gains. We saw this across the pandemic, but the company’s evidenced progress in sticking to its road map for development of its chips has given many the reassurance they need to switch. The fact that the processors deliver superb performance at comparatively very low power requirements means pro users are finding it increasingly easy to justify the switch.

Decoding Apple’s announcements at WWDC, you can see the intentionality behind the company’s progress on its processor pilgrimage.

At the very highest end for the most demanding users, Apple now offers systems that absolutely devour similarly priced PCs, but the 15-inch MacBook Air shows the extent to which the company is also raising expectations for what computers should be able to do for consumers.

Vision Pro, meanwhile, articulates this message: now that Apple has these powerful processors, it isn’t afraid to use them to aggressively build completely new computing hardware concepts. As it does so, it generates additional heat for all the products in its fleet, raising status across all its platforms while increasing their appeal.

I don’t believe for one second that Vision Pro could exist without Apple Silicon, which is why Apple’s processors remain the stars of the developer show.

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