Now imagine that with a laptop’s power budget. Put a Transmetta like x86 decoder in front for legacy apps, combine with Apple’a full stack control, custom blocks on the chips, llvm bitcode and a few more years of development and you end up with a laptop that covers 80% of Apple’s market.
They can still use Intel for higher end machines, but the bulk of laptops will be all Apple. Along with unbeatable battery life.
Translating from x86 on the fly to run most existing desktop apps combined with switching to an under performing platform would be a one two punch that would make apple unpalatable compared to the competition. Further it would disable the idea of installing windows in a partition for gaming or other purposes. It would further require supporting software on both x86 and arm unless apple is willing to wholly surrender the high end.
Apple laptops already have a good battery life. I don't think people would be willing to give up performance relative to competitors products to have better battery life.
Basically in sum you are expecting apple to support 2 different hardware arch on the desktop/laptop, have inferior performance compared to windows, give up bootcamp etc in order for people to have 14 hours of battery instead of 9 when they will just do what they currently do and plug their devices in when they go to bed.
Its certainly an interesting idea but I think the downsides outweigh the positives.
I think different people have different use cases. Not everyone is tied to legacy apps. I’m sure a lot of MacBook Airs are just used for web and email. Look at the Macbook, it’s trade-offs are for people that want long battery life and probably do a lot of typing. Think journalists on the road, on long flights. I’m sure that market would jump at longer battery life for majority of apps.
As for not being able to install Windows, I’m sure you could if the x86 front end was in silicon (again, think Transmetta), but it is probably not for that target market anyway.
As for Apple supporting two systems, I don’t see the problem. They did it for the 68k to PPC and PPC to x86 transition, and when you own the entire stack, including system language and build chain, it probably isn’t as big a deal as cross platform with different APIs and paradigms.
