Pegatron likely to land new MacBook orders from Apple, say sources

Actually, maybe dymamic binary translation wouldn't be needed all that often. A new Rosetta would likely also be helped out quite a bit by the fact that modern macOS binaries contain embedded copies of their their LLVM intermediate representation; you could transpile that IR (by patching Intel-targeted intrinsics with ARM polyfills) and then run it through the LLVM optimizer again, and then cache the result. That's a fully static binary translation, and the resulting binaries would probably be pretty fast.

(You'd still need dynamic binary translation for anything with its own JIT, but maybe there are few enough programs with their own JITs—and all such programs are "big" enough in terms of development resources—that Apple can require these to ship an ARM target. In which case, maybe they don't need to build a new dynamic binary translation component at all!)

You might want to go look at Apple's history at how they managed to pull off two of the largest CPU transitions in history almost effortlessly. It's called fat binaries or in Apple's world, universal binary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_binary).

You don't need to ship two separate copies, you just include a target and Xcode will give you a single copy that works on two separate platforms.

In addition, Microsoft is also going through the same phase with their own ARM branch of Windows 10.

You make a very good point. The dominance of x86 is largely because it forms the long-standing open PC platform, which while Apple and others have been trying to remove "legacy" features from and lock down for a long time, still remains quite well-documented and open in comparison to smartphone/tablet SoCs that have next to no detailed public documentation at all.

It would be a big job, but much of the software on Homebrew is already ARM compatible, and I think there’s a clear path to supporting that, which should make the migration relatively seamless for most developers I’d imagine.

It won’t be without issue, but I don’t think it will hurt macOS as a development OS much in the long run.

Maybe Adobe will finally take Linux seriously if that happens.

The term "modified OS X" makes it sound hybrid, but I don't see space in apples line for something between a Mac and an iPad.

There's not technal reason to not go with full macOS. It's Unix and it runs on ARM.

I think this would be a great time for Adobe to partner with Canonical as a supported platform for Creative Suite. With improved funding and work towards getting NVidia and AMD support top of line.

It's not nice for those with unsupported software bit I don't see this holding back Apple.