1/ I worked at Apple during the Intel and 64 bit transitions. I disagree with this take.
A Mac ARM move really would be about vertical integration. Apple wants to control its roadmaps - same reason they moved iPhone to in-house ARM chips.
Sinfosky argues that vertical integration could be accomplished by offering AMD devices. Dude, that's horizontal, not vertical. Apple would still be at the mercy of someone else's roadmap.
It would be the job of the software org to smooth the transition. The first productized ARM Mac has to be an "acceptable" Mac. That means it has to do most of what existing Macs do so, that people will buy it.
A huge software transition *simultaneous* with a huge hardware transition would be boiling the ocean. It wouldn't be a Mac, it would be a new product that competes with the Mac (and iPad).
Yes, the software org has its own interests, and recognizes that compat breaks afford a rare opportunity to shed APIs they no longer wish to support. Intel and 64-bit are other examples where APIs were dropped. No doubt there will be many examples here.
But shedding Cocoa, and offering just Catalyst? Not only is Cocoa so central to the Mac experience, there's already an awesome device that supports mouse and keyboard and runs exclusively Catalyst apps. It's called an iPad. I love mine and use it daily, yet it's not a Mac.
Oh, and Rosetta was not "awful." Quite the opposite: it was shockingly seamless in most cases.
My personal fear is that ARM Macs will only run sandboxed apps. We'll see.
(Apologies for the name typo here!)
