[msbarnett]

It certainly meets the "improbable and kooky" parts of a conspiracy theory. There are several problems with it:

1) Apple already managed one processor transition without herding everyone onto a standardized API. Surely they'd go that route again.

2) If they weren't going that route, then surely they'd be trying to herd as many people as possible onto the standardized API. But the App Store as Stealth API Standardizer doesn't hold water; if that's what it were intended to do, they would have tried to make it appeal to every important vendor on the platform. Instead, it's squarely aimed at small indie developers and excludes or is otherwise not strategically interesting to important 3rd party vendors like Adobe, Valve, VMWare, Mathworks, Microsoft, etc, etc. Are they not coming along to the transition?

3) What is Apple going to transition to? ARM? Seriously? They're great low-powered CPUs, but they're not within a million miles of Intel's Core i* CPUs for the "truck" computing that Apple's pro machines are used for. Compiling software on a 1 GHz A4 would be painful; editing video on it would be downright insane. This may change in years to come, but we're nowhere near close enough for it to happen any time soon.

[metageek]

1) Apple already managed one processor transition

Two, actually. 68k to PPC to x86.

[msbarnett]

Good point.

[maercsrats]

1) Good point. Using the backdoor of the app store would just be easier for them to do (I would imagine).

2) Maybe they will be bringing along the big guys, in the future. Java is being deprecated (http://bit.ly/cFp0GX) in the future the may require apps to use the standard API.

3) ARM chips are getting much better. The A-15 is going to be multicore and be up to 2.5 GHz (http://bit.ly/bhVKBP). It is totally possible for apple engineers, gotten from PA Semi, to string together more cores to make a more powerful process. Difficult and costly, but possible.

The problem I see with this line of thinking is that ARM is only a 32 bit arch right now and I don't know of any plans on changing that. Also, having the big guys convert their software over to using ARM instructions over intel (point 2) would be really painful, I think. LLVM and some good virtualization might help mitigate this, but I would have to research that more.

Also, I'm probably completely wrong and I'm fine with that. You have very good points and I appreciate all of them.