ARM doesn't really matter very much to Apple - Apple designs the micro-architecture and many (most?) of the other SOC components themselves.
With the technology moves Apple has made, they could probably switch to RISC-V at this point, however being able to use ARM devtools probably adds more value to Apple than any cost savings moving Apple would gain from moving away from ARM
No, the custom silicon matters more. They've spent years building infrastructure to make it easy to change late stage code generation to multiple ISAs.
It doesn't. Ninety-nine point five nines of software is architecture-independent, and if you're an App Store sharecropper you'll never notice. It's the users with paid-for x86 binaries who will be screwed, like they were when Apple removed the ability to run PowerPC binaries in OS X 10.7.
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They mentioned running Linux in a VM at least twice in the keynote. I'm not sure why, unless it's an acknowledgement that OS X is no longer a usable development environment.
Linux, like any OS written in the past 30 years, is substantially architecture-independent. My day job involves coding for several devices with Linux kernels on ARM (32bit) and Aarch64 and I have no idea which is which, nor any need to.
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(‘ARM’ has become meaningless marketing drivel; there are physically existing pairs of 32-bit ‘ARM’ processors that have exactly zero physically existing machine instructions in common.)
[Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose.
With the technology moves Apple has made, they could probably switch to RISC-V at this point, however being able to use ARM devtools probably adds more value to Apple than any cost savings moving Apple would gain from moving away from ARM