[icanhackit]

> user patience and goodwill, basically political capital with the user base.

Or they can go down the Trojan Horse route and bolt one of their A-series chips as a co-processor to a board with an x86 CPU, begin the process of rewriting the OS and other assets in their control to run on ARM and provide some encouragement for dev's to make the switch over the next 4-5 years.

By having an ARM co-processor lightening the load running system assets they could balance the parts cost by using a previous generation x86 CPU.

They've already offloaded the System Management Controller, image signal processor, audio controller, and SSD controller to the T2 chip (64-bit ARMv8 A10 derivative: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208862) - the next step would be integrating T2 into a full blown CPU/SOC. Maybe T2 was the beginning of the Trojan Horse?