Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on September 24, 2013 7:20 am wrote:
> Jose (1.delete@this.2.com) on September 24, 2013 6:56 am wrote:
> > > Keep in mind that it is very unlikely that Apple with have an ARM chip that
> > > is *performance* competitive with Haswell (or what follows) for a long time.
> > >
> > > Do you expect Apple to attempt to "migrate" Macintosh customers to a slower platform?
> > >
> > It depends, especially for portable devices, it if becomes "fast enough" and offers significant
> > improvement in batery life and decreased cost. And they do not have to migrate all customers
> > right away. They already have experience supporting a mixed environment (PPC/x86).
>
> The mixed environments have always been in the context of supporting an older/slower CPU
> while migrating folks to a newer/faster CPU [68K -> PPC, PPC -> x86]. And in both cases
> Apple pretty much ended older/slower sales when they introduced the newer/faster CPU.
>
> Having 1/2 your customers on one platform (say, MacBook Pro as x86 and MacBook Air
> as ARM) is a recipe for disaster/confusion when some apps will only run on some computers.
> This doesn't play well with the "it just works" message that Apple pushes.
>
> I don't think we'll get a split Mac product line with some on ARM and some on x86.
>
> I *can* see a "dockable" iThingie that runs iThingie desktop apps (including the iWork suite)
> ... but the strategy would be to "grow up" the iThingie line, not transition the Mac.

From technical perspective, Apple may mitigate the disadvantages of having a mixed environment if they modify their development tools to create fat binaries by default one or two years before the actual product introduction of an ARMv8 based MacBooks. Unfortunately that approach will give away their intend as people will quickly find out when OSX binaries suddenly contain both x86 and ARMv8 code. So therefore I do not think it is a very likely scenario.

On the other hand, Apple's A7 64-bit design and the extend how they implemented a whole new 64-bit ecosystem, was a surprise for me and I guess most of us.