[pier25]

Achieving the same level of performance with ARM is only half the story.

Apple has to surpass the Core i series to make any sense to switch.

And then there's the whole clusterfuck that would be porting all the x86 software to ARM. When Apple switched to Intel emulation of Power PC was usable via Rosetta but AFAIK emulation of x86 with ARM is extremely slow.

[skykooler]

I wonder whether it could be possible for Apple to build in a hardware accelerator for the x86 emulator into the chip?

...Though at that point I suppose they'd basically be building an x86 co-processor into it. No idea if that would actually help performance or not.