Hackintosh would be obviously a thing of the past if they went ARM-exclusive.

Eventually. It would be a long time until x86 builds of macOS stopped shipping.

Not necessarily. Apple is renowned for dropping support for things.

The list of Macs supported by Catalina goes back to 2012: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210222

At least until the rest of the PC world moves to ARM.

If Apple hits a jackpot a couple of years later I'm sure we will see the same on the Windows world.

The rest of the PC world includes a lot of desktops, and the cost/benefit analysis there is very different - power consumption matters little, and games demand top-of-the-line performance. So I don't think it'll move to ARM wholesale anytime soon.

It would just be stuck on the last x86 release of the OS.

But even more likely is someone would port it to off the shelf ARM processors.

> port it to off the shelf ARM processors

My guess is that Apple will put some effort into ensuring this will be non-trivial (read: impossible).

Apple is unlikely to waste engineering resources and product resources on something they don't care about. Hackintoshes are largely an enthusiast phenomenon that doesn't overlap much with their core market of people willing to spend a premium on hardware that "just works" and looks nice. For the last 10 years Apple hasn't lifted a finger to stop them , why would they start now?

The danger is not so much T2 chips or the like, because that can easily be defeated in software, but locking down peripheral support would be. For instance if they only support their own custom graphics hardware that would be a problem. This is what Apple tends to do so it's the most likely scenario.

They did waste legal resources going after commercial Hackintosh clones, though, and they might want to prevent something similar in the future. And once they have their own unique CPUs, adding a CPU ID check is trivial.

And defeating a CPU ID check is trivial.

Companies selling hardware that is "Mac compatible" and profiting from that is a very different thing. Apple clearly cares about that.

Exactly. macOS will surely start to require the T2 (or newer) chip.

I wouldn't put past some enthusiasts to use QEMU or some other ARM->x86 emulator/jit

That would be fairly slow, though.