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Apple Bringing “Hey Siri” to the iMac Pro with Tweaked iPhone 7 Chip

“Hey Siri” voice option to be enabled on iMac Pro

Nov 20, 2017 13:07 GMT  ·  By
Apple's iMac Pro will launch by the end of the year
   Apple's iMac Pro will launch by the end of the year

Apple is believed to be working on bringing a new series of features to the upcoming iMac Pro, including what could be “Hey Siri” command support enabled by a tweaked version of iPhone 7’s A10 Fusion chip.

BridgeOS code has revealed that Apple plans to use the iPhone 7 CPU as a co-processor to power a series of tasks in an approach similar to the one on its smartphone, thus making sure that the monster Xeon processor won’t kick in for less-demanding processes.

After inspecting the firmware, developer Steve Troughton-Smith says there’s a chance A10 will power the boot and security processes of macOS on the iMac Pro, while Guilherme Rambo discovered that Apple would most likely enable “Hey Siri” support on the device with the same chip.

“Looks like the iMac Pro's ARM coprocessor is arm64 🤔 Seems to handle the macOS boot & security process, as expected; iMac Pro lets Apple experiment with tighter control without the rest of the userbase freaking out,” Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted.

“Hey Siri” on the Mac

This means that waking up the digital assistant will no longer require anything else than a voice command, similar to how Cortana currently works on Windows 10 devices. “Hey Siri” support already exists on the iPhone as well.

Apple putting ARM coprocessors into its computers isn’t something entirely new and it was originally believed that the company would embrace a similar approach for the MacBook Pro as well. The most recent model of the laptop does come with a coprocessor called T1 which handles low-power tasks, but this would be the first time the company switches to its own A-series of chips for a similar approach.

The new iMac Pro is projected to launch sometime before the end of the year, and as 9to5mac notes, Apple is still experimenting with the A chips that could make their way from the iPhone to the Mac, so full information will be provided when the device is ready to launch soon.