Apple shares climbed to an all-time high at the close of Nasdaq trading on Tuesday, rising $10.53, or 3.16 percent, and hitting $343.99 per share. Apple now has a market value of almost $1.491 trillion.
Despite a bumpy start to the year, tech stocks have fared well during the global health crisis. Apple saw its stocks fall in February and March due to supplier constraints, store closures, and ongoing curbs on travel and transport, but demand for new devices was buoyed by increasing numbers of people working from home, and that saw Apple's share price surge again in April.
Tuesday's high came on the back of news that Apple plans to announce an upcoming shift to Arm-based Macs at its virtual WWDC event later this month.
Swapping over to its own house-made chips should allow Apple to release updates on its own schedule and with perhaps more frequent technology improvements. Apple should also be able to differentiate its devices from competing products with chips designed by its own internal teams, introducing even tighter integration between hardware and software.
There have been some mixed rumors on when Apple could launch the first Arm-based Macs. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple will release MacBook models with its own custom processors in the fourth quarter of 2020 or the first quarter of 2021.
Kuo expects Apple to release several Mac notebooks and desktop computers with custom designed Arm-based processors in 2021, so the custom processors won't be limited to just one machine. Bloomberg has said that Apple is aiming to release at least one Mac with a custom-designed Arm-based processor by 2021.
