Apple could adopt ARM for laptops, but why would it?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
A couple of recent examples are Thunderbolt and the unreleased Z68 chipset that is in the newest iMacs.
I really doubt this will happen anywhere in the near future simply because ARM chips don't have good performance compared to x86 chips. Most people would be unwilling to accept a performance downgrade.
I could see the MacBook Air line and other consumer products going in that direction, but certainly not the MacBook Pros or the Mac Pro desktop for that matter. These products are targeted towards serious professionals who need performance. The notion of ARM chips in a workstation computer is laughable for the near future.
There's pretty much zero chance ARM will ever reach performance parity with x86. Not to mention Intel's near two year process technology lead over everyone else.
The only scenario I see something like this happening is far in the future, when everything transitions towards the cloud and thin clients. But for now, we need real computers with real performance.
But do workstations need state of the art performance? Once upon a time, they did. Today they don't, but are only behind by a small factor. That gap may grow to a few orders of magnitude some day, especially if all the performance advances come from multi-core, which workstations have a hard time exploiting fully.
Maybe Apple sees the desktop performance requirements leveling off enough for ARM to catch up. It's not hard to imagine the laptops of tomorrow being in the same performance class as phones and tablets.
Apple's profits dependent on Apple's control over component costs, but their dependence on Intel threatens this. It is hard to negotiate prices down when there is no viable alternative supplier.
If Apple can control developers enough to switch to ARM and write efficient code for 'just good enough' ARM-based laptops, then Apple should switch as soon as possible.
I'm not so sure about that.
Excluding gamers and power users, I'd say that in the last 5-10 years, most people haven't even had a clue about how the performance of their personal computer will compare. Everything's just "fast enough" for most people.
Performance increases, if any, are more likely to be attributed to Windows reinstallations or the fresh setup in a new computer rather than the CPU power. Installing more memory and better hard drives have more to do with the snappiness of a personal computer than the CPU.
In fact, heck, I'm a programmer and the last time I think I cared about the processor speed was in the turn of the 2000's. I do notice CPU performance when compiling big codebases but compared to hours of turnaround time in the 90's any messages from the compilation units have generally just been swooshing by at an unprecedented pace during the last decade.
I would notice an ARM CPU on my main development laptop but I could probably live with that easily, especially given the better battery life and decreased heat production of an ARM chip.
Anyone else from office workers to my parents probably would never guess if it's ARM or x86, even if the former was 1GHz and the latter was 3GHz.
Biggest reason the Apple-ARM rumor is not entirely infeasible to me is Apple has never been performance-first, and I could see them taking a performance hit for aesthetic or form gains.
Cutting costs, increasing power efficiency, and decreasing physical size are all good ideas in my book.
It's a new world out there. People are finally expecting software to run faster while requiring less. Each version of Android has noticeable speedups on identical hardware. Snow Leopard freed up 6GB of storage when upgrading from Leopard. Inefficient software no longer buoys hardware sales. For ultra portable devices, in which category I would put many laptop lines, power and size are all that really matter. Granted, netbooks suck, but a device that's "good enough" speed-wise is fine for such requirements.
The only notable exception that I can think of right now is a car. But as for computers, that's very much an appliance in my eyes, despite being a developer and coding on Linux and Windows all day at work.