I really don't see any "tactical" advantage. MS has similar toolchains. MS has also done a similar 32-bit to 64-bit transition. And to top it off MS has done it

I really don't see any "tactical" advantage. MS has similar toolchains. MS has also done a similar 32-bit to 64-bit transition. And to top it off MS has done it on a PC, and not an smartphone where people do not depend on running "random" binaries. The fact that MS has also tried several times to switch from ARM but no advantage has ever materialized also casts a huge doubt on the tactical advantages of an ARM migration. The power savings are not apparent: neither the Surface RT nor the Surface Pro X have significantly better battery life, likely because they've (very much like Apple will do) decided to reduce thickness. The performance is not there as both devices were reviewed as slow. And the cost advantage is also not there seeing that the Surface Pro X was more expensive than most of the Intel Surface Pros, at least for launch price (and we can certainly expect Apple not to lower prices, either). I am guessing MS had more margins on the ARM devices, and that's about it, but it makes for a hard sale for users. Also those margins will evaporate as they are forced to reduce the price of the SP X. Apple's previous migrations depended on the _huge_ performance improvement of the newer platform. Up to the point where porting programs to the new platform was not even always required, as the emulator would be performant enough to still show a performance improvement overall. In this case, the new platform has likely similar or slightly lower performance, and we care much more about power consumption, so emulation cost will be very noticeable and users will penalize non-native binaries heavily. Apple has the advantage of the huge collection of iOS apps but I also hesitate whether this advantage will transfer to the MacBook or not. Most people do not buy MacBooks to run oversized iPhone apps. They already have the iPad for that.