"Hence a prediction: within less than 5 years a Mac will be running on an Apple designed ARM processor." That assertion presupposes that Apple will give up the

"Hence a prediction: within less than 5 years a Mac will be running on an Apple designed ARM processor." That assertion presupposes that Apple will give up the professional content creation market entirely. If they've killed off Shake and curtailed developement on Final Cut Pro, then I'g guess that your theory has some merit. The reason? The upcoming 2.5 GHz ARM core will most likely be performance competitive with today's x86, but by the time it comes to market, we'll most likely be looking at a Sandy Bridge refresh, and even the first Sandy Bridge processors will most likely smoke the best that ARM can throw at it. The ARM will almost certainly continue to dominate the low-power markets though. I don't see a high likelihood of x86 making it there. I'd even go out on a limb and suggest that if Intel wanted to compete head-to-head with ARM, their best bet would be a low-power Itanium, since it's not saddled with x86 hardware any more, and therefore requires considerably less logic to match x86 performance with the same manufacturing technology.