First, It's all very early. As things unfold, don't forget that.
I did not notice this news as it broke last night. I was deep in trying to get some Windows Servers and Windows 10 to play nice to each other. I was not able to do it. The reason I could not, is interesting today with this news. Microsoft is starting to prevent you from using Windows on systems with older processors, not because they want you to need to buy a new system and then they could sell you a Surface, no they are adding features to their OSes that need certain processor features to be able to work. What happens if you don't have a new enough processor. Simple, you can't install the new version of Windows. We are seeing this first on Windows Server but they have said it's coming to Windows 10 as well. It looks like they are going to do this in both directions. New systems will not run old versions of windows
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft-windows-support-policy-new-processors-skylake and as we are seeing in Windows 2016 Server, it will not install if you don't have the correct processor features. (In this case SLAT). So Microsoft is looking to insure that you are using the newest software (Duh) and also the latest hardware. I am sure Intel is happy about that. With this news I am sure that Intel will be pushing their major Hardware partners to push this idea (obsoleting your system) even harder. Intel wants these CPU's to go away. If they could make Microsoft or Apple the bad guys that would be great. OK, so this is
MAC Rumors so where does this all leave Apple.
First, might this cause them to look harder at the idea that Mac's should move to ARM. Yes it will. But I don't think that will happen. Not totally. There might be a ARM Mac someday. But I do not see Apple giving up on the X86 platform for some time. Why? lots of reasons. First you would have to BUY all new software. Developers would have to write all new software. The rumor about a common app platform across ios and Mac OS would help, but customers still want to run the software they have. And don't say emulation. We don't want emulation. By the way, know what the most popular application is on Macs. WINDOWS. So X86 is not going anywhere. Not now. Microsoft is doing work to run Windows on ARM , so maybe someday, ARM will make more sense for all of us.
Also, let's talk legal. There will be lawsuits. There are ALWAYS lawsuits. But what you can file and what you can win are not the same thing. I am not yet sure that there is much to sue about here. We don't yet know enough about this. But I own several computers with these CPU's and I do not think I will ever see much of anything out of the legal avenue.
Yes this is a big deal. We do not yet know how big of a deal this is. We don't know the full problem and how you fix it. We don't know what that fix will cause. We don't know how OS makers and Computer makers are going to respond. We don't know how Intel is going to respond.
That all takes me back to where I started. It's early. Someone earlier in the thread suggested popping some popcorn and sitting back and watching. That sounds like the best advice at this point.