[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.