Yup, agree with both of you. This would be a way for Intel to not only keep Apple's business, but facilitate their ARM migration by offering to throw some custom Intel-only hardware onto the chip to help it run x86 code faster. So they keep Apple's business and (some) of their own architecture in place going forward.
I was somewhat surprised to hear that Intel was moving to ARM production, and most certainly Apple is behind it as you'd never expect Intel to be willing to do something like this of their own accord. I figured they would beat x86 to death until they went under.
As a hardware partner, Apple may have been telling the higher-ups at Intel that their days using x86 were numbered. Intel knows that as Apple goes, so goes the market. At least that's how it generally works these days. They could sweeten the deal by promising iOS A-series contracts to make the switch worth their while.
You're probably right about Intel putting custom instructions and other optimizations into their chip designs to help with porting legacy software through the transition. Considering how relatively smooth the transition from PowerPC to Intel was, I imagine this transition will be even smoother with another 10 years of experience along with experience being a chip designer.
It makes so much sense when you look at the buyer's guide and see "DON'T BUY" pretty much across the board for the Mac lineup. Why would they let every single Mac fall behind? Especially given all their chest puffing saying "Can't innovate my ass!" when they announced the Mac Pro just a few years ago? Why let that thing get so outdated? I never thought they would be crazy enough to move everything to ARM at once, but now I have to wonder. The dark horse announcement for an autumn event? Makes sense why they're adding important yet likely easy to port features from iOS to make things even more cohesive. Could they have the iPhone/iPad event in September and then a crazy ARM Mac event at Apple Campus 2 in late October or early November?
Tim: "Welcome to our new home, Apple Campus 2. This building gives us a solid foundation to design and develop innovative products for decades to come. And that innovation and solid foundation starts today with the Apple X1 processor. To tell you more about this processor, I would like to invite to the stage Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, Dan Riccio to the stage."
Dan: "Thanks, Tim. For many years now our team here at Apple has been collaborating with Intel on a new chip design that bridges the gap between mobile and desktop. A chip that possesses the compact size and efficiency of a mobile processor, with the sheer performance found on a desktop. This is a single chip that can run both iOS and Mac OS software. And we're going to show you that chip now. Brian?"
Brian: *Holds an incredibly tiny chip with a pair of tweezers. The camera zooms way in for dramatic effect.* "This is the X1, the first ARM chip fabricated by Intel, designed in partnership with Apple. Watt for watt these chips are about 50% faster than their current generation i-series counterparts when optimized by Apple's multi-core framework. The chip I'm holding is the X1-C, which is suitable for the MacBook. It has six cores and runs at 2GHz, but only consumes 6 watts of power. This is possible due to Intel's industry-leading 10nm process."
I got tired or writing dialog, but they would go on to talk about the performance advantages, maybe Craig would come up and do a demo, etc, showing cross-compatibility with iOS apps and talking about Xcode updates and how the scaling works to port iOS apps. Someone like Phil would come up on stage and talk about innovation, go through all the new specs across the Mac line, etc. They would show performance numbers and how they compare to older Intel chips. They'd talk about backwards compatibility with x86 applications and demo that. They would talk about the different performance tiers. I imagine they would have a few different tiers for the processor based on performance and how much power it uses. I envision the iPhone and iPad running something like the X1-C. The iPad Pro and MacBooks running something like an X1-B, and maybe the MacBook Pro/iMac/Mac Pro running some variation of the X1-A (maybe the MacBook Pro could have one X1-A with 12 cores or something, and the iMac would have two X1-As, and the Mac Pro would have four X1-As. And yes, I realize my naming convention isn't the best. Hopefully they come up with something better. But what I'm getting at is that it would be important to denote different levels of performance, much like they do with the i3, i5, and i7. Although the iPhone having a "lower tier" chip could hurt it's branding as a premium device. So IDK, maybe they'll just change the first letter, or keep the A-series for the iPhone and only use the X-series on the Macs and maybe the iPad Pro. It would be a really fun show!
