As part of its move to Intel chips in early 2006, the Cupertino-based company largely abandoned its practice of using custom motherboard chipsets to support the primary CPU in its Macs. Instead, it began to rely on slightly tweaked versions of industry-standard chipsets offered by Intel to the broad range of PC manufacturers that develop Intel-powered systems.
For instance, while Apple’s existing line of MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks are unique in that they run the Mac OS X operating system, they’re architecturally based on the same run-of-the-mill processors and chipsets …