If one day ARM offered competitive performance to future high-end Intel chips, it would be hard to say no to a switch.
From a developer perspective it's a bit annoying, but having survived the switch from 68K to PPC to Intel, all of which were surprisingly painless, I'm sure this next one could be pretty straight-forward as well.
If there's one rule that's proven itself over and over it that emulating today's CPU is trivial on tomorrow's hardware. A 68K requires inconsequential resources even on an iPhone, and even the then powerhouse G5 PPC is barely a fraction of the speed of the slowest Intel chip shipping today.
To a large degree Apple has already "switched" in terms of units sold. Intel continues to shrink in terms of share and might even sink to 10-15% of CPUs within a few years as the iPad, iPhone and future iOS devices continue to sell well.
From a developer perspective it's a bit annoying, but having survived the switch from 68K to PPC to Intel, all of which were surprisingly painless, I'm sure this next one could be pretty straight-forward as well.
If there's one rule that's proven itself over and over it that emulating today's CPU is trivial on tomorrow's hardware. A 68K requires inconsequential resources even on an iPhone, and even the then powerhouse G5 PPC is barely a fraction of the speed of the slowest Intel chip shipping today.
To a large degree Apple has already "switched" in terms of units sold. Intel continues to shrink in terms of share and might even sink to 10-15% of CPUs within a few years as the iPad, iPhone and future iOS devices continue to sell well.