Some of the engineering behind Apple's latest M7 and M8 chips can be traced back to an unexpected place: the company's canceled electric car effort.
According to AppleInsider, the power of Apple's M7 and M8 chips was born from research originally done for the Apple Car project. In other words, work that began in service of building a vehicle ended up feeding into the silicon Apple now ships in its computing products.
Apple's car program, long rumored and eventually shelved, was one of the company's most ambitious and secretive undertakings. Building a car — even a partly automated one — requires serious processing power to handle sensors, real-time computation, and demanding workloads. AppleInsider's report indicates that the chip research pursued for that goal did not simply vanish when the car plans wound down. Instead, it appears to have carried forward into Apple's M-series processors.
That kind of crossover is common in large technology companies: an expensive, discontinued project can still pay off if its underlying engineering finds a new home. Here, the reporting suggests the car team's chip work became part of the foundation for the M7 and M8.
Apple has not, in this source, detailed exactly which pieces of the car research made their way into the chips, so the specifics of that lineage remain broad rather than granular.
Why it matters: it shows that even Apple's failed moonshots can quietly shape the products millions of people actually end up using — meaning a car that never shipped may still be powering the devices on your desk.