It's a big blow for professionals - enough to jump ship, if majors of the likes of Adobe and Avid aren't ready when it launches. + It means they need to either maintain two architectures, or switch desktops to ARM as well... Which is just can't see happening since x86 still outperforms it.
I think more likely scenario is switch to AMD and some kind of exclusivity and tighter collab on chip design (something intel isnt willing to do)
I just don't see Apple phasing out Intel on higher end machines. Logic is immensely popular, it's one of the 3 most common DAWs used for scoring TV and film, and Apple is very well aware of that. They're also well aware that Logic users love their 3rd party Audio Units, and I can't think of any other DAW whose dot releases can touch what the Logic developers accomplish in a release cycle.
I also can't see Apple being unaware of the popularity of Ableton Live, Native Instruments, Pro Tools, etc... (The Mac page currently features an Ableton Live artist, (Grimes), as one of the three people Apple’s spotlighting to sell the mac brand... I don’t think that's an arbitrary choice…)
And, that's only the audio side… Other than Final Cut, Apple doesn't have anything else that competes with Adobe's creative products. There's no native Apple graphics editor that comes within a mile of what Photoshop can do, no design suite, no motion graphics application resembling After Effects… Again, I just don’t see Apple being unaware about the impact it would have on the mac brand if the third party developers who dominate the mac’s creative ecosystem were left behind due to an inability to adapt to ARM.
The only rational thing I’ve read is that ARM will be a coprocessor like the T2… One that runs most of the background garbage that currently runs on the CPU, background garbage that takes a toll on CPU hungry programs like those mentioned above...
Imagine if all of the syncing, notification-pushing, background tasking, app store/app store apps, itunes, etc ran on a discreet processor... If anything that should be a substantial performance boost for audio-visual work.
As far as their repair policy? Not a fan, and completely onboard with R2R. Apple past the Trillion dollar mark, the revenue lost to 3rd party repair shops is table scraps, and considering they don't service out of warranty/AC products there's literally no competition, let alone no rationale.
That said, I do think they realize customers aren't capable of replacing their devices every few years, and that's been one of the major things driving up prices... Some of the features they've opened up recently on the cMP suggest they're not actually trying to kill them off ASAP. I never thought I'd say it, but it actually seems kind of like Apple might just be brand-smart enough to realize that the worst thing accomplished by a bunch of silver mac Pros still being used to create media is having a reputation for making a really durable machine that and still hangs in there with current machines almost a decade later.
Now if they'd just stop soldering **** to the logic board... (Aint gonna happen, I know...)