What I see as more likely is that Apple is hedging it’s bets. On the iPhone / iPad side, they continue to develop better and better processors. One day they _may_ be sufficiently better than Intel that Apple could pull a “Rosetta” a second time on the Mac, translating apps from x86 to ARM at the software level.

But that’s still a tall ask at the high end, and splitting the Mac lineup into models that can’t all run the same software isn’t appealing.

So in the meantime, it makes sense to push the iPad toward being a stronger and stronger computing platform with things like the recently added trackpad, better multi tasking, etc. They’ve got a way to go, but given a few more years of iteration, who knows how many more of the “real computer” niches the iPad can fill.

If the processor advantage never reaches the point that it can emulate x86 at full speed, then the Mac line probably won’t transition, and Apple will probably shift it farther upmarket as the iPad cannibalizes every use case that doesn’t need x86. And if the processors do get that much better, then ARM comes to the Mac.

Either way, Apple is in a good place to leverage the iPad as their vision of what the next generation of the personal computer looks like.