I’m a Mac user and am not terribly enthusiastic about abandoning x86_64 (though I have to admit I was one of the die-hands that stuck with PowerPC G5 for as lon

I’m a Mac user and am not terribly enthusiastic about abandoning x86_64 (though I have to admit I was one of the die-hands that stuck with PowerPC G5 for as long as humanly possible, so maybe I’m a conservative and a nostalgic). I do, however, adore my iPad Pro (with Magic Keyboard). I’ve been using top-of-the-line iPads as an essential ingredient of my computing ecology for more than a decade now and I’ve been predominantly iPad-only for the past seven. The iPad represents not so much a laptop replacement as it it offers a laptop replacemeny. Anyway, I do see (through my experience with the iPads being refined over various generations) that they now have more than plenty performance and accoutrements to serve as the genesis for a new line of ARM-based laptops, starting from the bottom end and gradually moving up. I’m a bit worried about the top end though (the Mac Pro and exotic software like Wolfram Research’s Mathematica). At any rate, I certainly hope that whatever Apple ships will have some kind of open bootloader or facility for installing other (ARM64) OSes so that their hardware can serve as one of the baselines for the open-source community to begin building on.