[mattkevan]

I see this being the first step as a multi-year transition away from Intel, rather than some sort of merger of iOS and macOS or a sudden architecture switch like PowerPC to Intel.

For now, the ARM will be a low-power co-processor handling a few tasks via specially compiled extensions. However, as Apple continues to iterate on the AX processors, and they, along with developers, figure out how to move more stuff onto ARM, the role of the Intel chips will decrease until they are the low-power co-processor running only legacy stuff which can't be easily ported or emulated. Until one day they just go away.

It makes sense that they'd want to own their core processor tech – they've got the talent and in a few years time will have the technology. It seems that each architecture change they've made has been driven by a supplier not being able to deliver, from Motorola with 68k to Motorola (again) and IBM with PowerPC and now Intel.

[mmastrac]

I mostly agree with this, but I still haven't figured out what the end-game for this might be. I believe that they'd just emulate low-power-requirement x86 and x64 code rather than keeping a low-end x64 chip in the laptop.

If a significant number of MBP customers are running VMWare or Parallels, however, this might seriously hurt the timeline for moving to 100% ARM. In that case they'd either have higher-end Macs with the x64 chips (potentially complicating the product line) or work on adding x64 emulation acceleration to their Ax chip line.