I am not worried but instead welcome the integration of their chips to protect the integrity of my machine's data from hackers or even government agencies. That I fully support and expect to see.
I do seriously doubt they will move away from an Intel compatible platform, at most if they did then perhaps AMD chips. If Apple took their Macs away from Intel compatibility I doubt I would buy a new one and it would put into question the ability to maintain what software library that exists for the platform.
>If Apple took their Macs away from Intel compatibility I doubt I would buy a new one and it would put into question the ability to maintain what software library that exists for the platform.
I'm not sure there's much reason to be that tied to the chip anymore... When you load up MariaDB on your Fedora box the commands to install it and run your software are identical whether it's Intel or ARM. Apple of all people just like (for example) the Linux community are perfectly capable of writing device drivers for each processor architecture and once that work is done really what else makes a MacOS machine on ARM vs Intel any different than a Linux distribution found on multiple architectures?
Particularly since Apple focus so heavily on positive customer experience I can't help but feel they'll make it as painless as possible. Most likely it's not a concern at all.
Apple already provides a hypervisor framework (and has previous experience with Rosetta), it’s not beyond reason that they could solve that issue themselves.
The main reason I was convinced to get a Mac was the move to Intel CPUs. I figured if there was a problem, I'd just install Windows, and I even bought a license for Parallels.
Since then I've occasionally spun up some Linux VMs in VirtualBox, I even installed Windows using Boot Camp on my first Mac for a while before deleting it to get the space back, but I've never made serious use of Intel compatibility. It's just never really been necessary, just occasionally useful but not enough to mean losing the option would be in any way a deal breaker.
Windows compatibility was always a checklist feature meant to convince anxious Windows users that switching would be fine. In practice hardly anyone bothered with it. And this was when the PC mattered more. If they're switching today I don't think they'll care at all about Windows compatibility (and it might not even be an issue since Microsoft seems to be switching to ARM as well).
I guess it depends on what you do. For example, if you're deploying to x86 servers and you're testing on local VMs using Vagrant or whatnot, it helps to be able to be using the exact same platform and not worry about unexpected bugs/issues that might be platform specific.
They could buy AMD and then have license to implement the x86_64 ISA in a similar fashion to how the A-series implement the ARM ISA. Bit far fetched, but not completely implausible.
On desktops or notebooks, where the power budget is much bigger an cooling more efficient, they might push for a high performance ARM chip, coupled with an x86 translation layer. They pulled this successfully twice already (m68k -> PPC and PPC -> x86).
I've been expecting a iPadTop ever since the A series chips started beating medium-end Intel chips in browser benchmarks. Just imagine how thin the device could be, how could Apple not do it? The A12X should be more than powerful enough to make a notebook feel snappy. It would be sort of an Apple Chromebook.
If you add in the heritage of NeXT, you will find more transitions. And while Apple only supported two platforms at a time, NeXT simultaneously supported various architectures: x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. (And maybe 68k, but not sure if that was concurrent with the others)
Who knows, but I think the most logical move for Apple would be to converge into a universal OS with the same architecture for all their products. If that happens it would also make sense for Apple to move all their hardware into their own chips.
I do seriously doubt they will move away from an Intel compatible platform, at most if they did then perhaps AMD chips. If Apple took their Macs away from Intel compatibility I doubt I would buy a new one and it would put into question the ability to maintain what software library that exists for the platform.