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Add one more to the "Reasons Apple would want to take control of their own destiny by putting their own chips in Macs" tally.

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Not to mention they've already done something similar when they switched chips from Power PC to Intel. I find it hard to see how they'd license x86, but who knows, they do have ridiculous amounts of money piled up...

I think it's easier for them to turn iPad + iOS into laptop that make a x86 processor.

... and unfortunately they aren’t likely to spend it on the Mac given the size of the market. Makes me sad.

But how many x86 legacy Mac apps would break if they switched to ARM?

Could it be the case that we’re really waiting on Apple’s lawyer team to figure out how to sidestep Intel’s x86 patent, so OSX can emulate x86 with a bunch of ARM chips?

Apple doesn't seem to care much about legacy software given their recent history. They could revive their Rosetta binary translator.

Intel is litigious when it comes to emulating x86.

The biggest issue is likely that they don't have performance headroom they could spend on the emulation though, x86-on-ARM would be way slower than Rosetta let alone m68k

Microsoft is doing exactly this:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/249292-microsoft-decla...

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