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I don’t think that it would kill desktop, but I’m sure that unless ARM will be much faster, developers will use x86 macs for a long time.

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Apple's latest iPad processors are competitive with low-end laptop x86 processors. And they have a much stricter power budget than a laptop. If Apple wants to go this route, then they probably have the capability to build the chips to support it.

The part you're discounting is just how resource intensive desktop apps are and how much optimization goes into iOS apps.

To really see the benefit of changing they would need to add a lot of cores, and then cross their fingers that 3rd party app developers know how to do true multi-core development.

I don't know about that A-series chips are competive with low-end intel in single-threaded performance. And they keep getting faster each year.

If that team were to design a bigger core aimed at laptops, then I wouldn't be surprised if they could make it competitive.

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