Apple may be exploring the possibility of using an open-source alternative to the Arm architecture, which it's been using in its products for decades.
According to a newly posted job alert, spotted by Tom's Hardware, Apple is looking for an engineer that specializes in RISC-V, an open-source architecture instruction set that allows device makers to build their own chips without having to pay a license or royalty. Apple currently uses the Arm architecture in its products, and it pays the company a royalty fee to use its instruction set.
Apple's job posting description states that the engineer will implement "innovative RISC-V solutions and state of the art routines" to Apple's products. Specifically, Apple hopes prospective engineers will be able to work with the RISC-V instruction set, as well as have an understanding of Arm.
Tom's Hardware theorizes that if Apple were to adopt the open-source instruction set of RISC-V, it may save the company money because it wouldn't need to pay Arm a license fee for its instruction set.
Every Arm core requires Apple to pay a licensing fee to Arm, and since the number of cores for things like SSD controllers and smartwatches will only increase, so will Apple's payments to Arm. As such, replacing at least some Arm cores with RISC-V cores could save Apple millions of dollars in royalty payments every year...
The job listing is a confirmation that Apple is exploring the use of RISC-V, but whether the company decides to implement the open-source technology remains to be seen. Apple's reliance on Arm has increased in the past year as Apple is in the process of switching its Mac lineup to Arm-based processors rather than Intel.
You'd think things would be slowing down heading into the holidays, but this week saw a whirlwind of Apple leaks and rumors while Apple started its next cycle of betas following last week's release of iOS 26.2 and related updates.
This week also saw the release of a new Apple Music integration with ChatGPT, so read on below for all the details on this week's biggest stories!
Top Stories
i...
Monday December 22, 2025 11:30 am PST by Juli Clover
Apple hasn't updated the Apple TV 4K since 2022, and 2025 was supposed to be the year that we got a refresh. There were rumors suggesting Apple would release the new Apple TV before the end of 2025, but it looks like that's not going to happen now.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said several times across 2024 and 2025 that Apple would...
Tuesday December 16, 2025 8:44 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Next year's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will be equipped with under-screen Face ID, and the front camera will be moved to the top-left corner of the screen, according to a new report from The Information's Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu.
As a result of these changes, the report said the iPhone 18 Pro models will not have a pill-shaped Dynamic Island cutout at the top of the screen....
Friday December 19, 2025 10:37 am PST by Juli Clover
Since the beginning of December, Apple has been pushing iPhone users who opted to stay on iOS 18 to install iOS 26 instead. Apple started by making the iOS 18 upgrades less visible, and has now transitioned to making new iOS 18 updates unavailable on any device capable of running iOS 26.
If you have an iPhone 11 or later, Apple is no longer offering new versions of iOS 18, even though there...
Monday December 22, 2025 3:20 pm PST by Juli Clover
The European Commission today praised the interoperability changes that Apple is introducing in iOS 26.3, once again crediting the Digital Markets Act (DMA) with bringing "new opportunities" to European users and developers.
The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same capabilities and access to device features that Apple's own products get. In iOS...
Apple is significantly increasing its reliance on Samsung for iPhone memory as component prices surge, according to The Korea Economic Daily.
Apple is said to be expanding the share of iPhone memory it sources from Samsung due to rapidly rising memory prices. The shift is expected to result in Samsung supplying roughly 60% to 70% of the low-power DRAM used in the iPhone 17, compared with a...
Tuesday December 16, 2025 4:42 pm PST by Juli Clover
There has been a whirlwind of rumors over the last few days, sourced from leaked internal software designed for the iPhone and the Mac, and news sites like The Information. Below, we have a quick recap of everything we've heard this week, which serves as a guide to Apple's product plans in 2026 and beyond.
We've organized the info by likely release date, though there are some products that...
Pretty much everyone has joined the RISC-V camp after the tech/trade war began, especially China. Western companies don't want to be limited in their potential customers. Alibaba, Loongson, Red Hat, even MIPS has gone RISC-V.
Even though the NVIDIA acquisition of ARM will probably never complete, Apple is smart to begin investing in RISC-V.
Alternatives, sure... but Apple plus open source? Yeah, right
What do you mean? Apple is heavily invested into open source, their platform is in fact built on open source initiatives. For example, virtually every modern browser today traces its codebase to WebKit, an open source browser engine developed by Apple. LLVM, one of the most used compiler frameworks, was built on Apples money.
RISC-V is nowhere close to being used in high-performance personal devices. It’s a great teaching platform and it has uses in low-end devices, but that’s about it. There is a lot of work to be done before it becomes a viable alternative to ARM64. But I could see Apple using it for secure coprocessors or something like that.
Also, Apple has an unlimited architecture license agreement with ARM. If they switch architectures again, it won’t be before 10-15 years.
Well, this was inevitable considering how much Apple hates Nvidia (who bought out ARM) over its graphics chip debacle while back. They do not want to pay Nvidia a single cent going forward and going with open source method will likely bring more chip innovation for the company.
