Will hackintosh be a thing once the ARM transition is complete? Surely Apple will bake in some security into their silicon that will prevent OS11 from running on anything but Genuine™ Apple Bionic.
The community --- providing it still exists --- will write them... or at least some of them. When I was playing around with Hackintosh many years ago (when they were still 32-bit), I took the lack of drivers as a motivation to learn how to write some. Of course, the PC legacy really helped with things like BIOS and related standards, so ARM will definitely have a much steeper curve.
(The diversity of ARM platforms in general put me off writing code for them --- it feels like a losing battle when there are so many platforms, especially when most of then are unlikely to even exist for much time. The fact that it is the same CPU core matters little when everything else is different. Maybe it is the same for many others.)
I seriously doubt the effort required to write a functional GPU driver is going to come from OSS for something as fringe as Hackintosh on a random ARM SoC, like you said they get replaced constantly and the landscape is fragmented.
In the meantime, Intel Macs will be alive and well. There is a 100 million Intel installed base. I doubt that Apple will be treating those customers badly in terms of support and 3rd party software vendors certainly won't. At current sale rates it will take Apple 5 years to draw even with an ARM installed base. Also the question of how popular the move to ARM will be is still open, given the severe backwards step in terms of compatibility. Apple may continue to offer some Intel hardware a bit longer than they intend.
Finally, for me at least, the thought of being stuck at some final version of macOS that supports my Intel Hackintosh is kind of appealing. Each major update seems like a step backward. Hopefully developers will appreciate these Intel diehards and support them longer than Apple does.
Apple can add all sort of logic in their chips that competitors won't be able to replicate.
That's already the case, and was advertised. See the keynote picture that's used (for example) in this article:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/23/why-the-macs-migr...
"Secure Enclave", "Machine Learning Accelerators", "HDR Display support", "Neural Engine", it's all already in there.
OTOH, Apple is smart enough not to tightly marry its software to a given hardware architecture - they were compiling Rhapsody for Intel from day one and a lot of iOS is directly lifted from macOS. Its lineage started running on 68K, then HP-PA, SPARC, x86, then mostly PPC, then mostly x86 again, and now it'll switch to mostly ARM.
Its about the media vendors.
Apple can afford to outright buy most of them. What I think they are doing, is preparing themselves for a time when they can own media, as well as the devices you use to view/experience it.
I don't think the Piracy wars are over, guys. They're gunning for us, and .. unless we've got tunnelling electron microscopes and other tawdry machines, its gonna be harder and harder to crack.
I don't see it happening myself.
Though there is an ongoing lawsuit as a result.
Actually, I'd love to read more about Corellium in general—have they made any technical details public, even high level? They seem to be very secretive about how it all works—which, to be fair, I can totally understand.