The near total lack of the word "intel" at the keynote was certainly quite noticeable. The question is how much was that a negotiating ploy for better pricing/stock with intel and how much was positioning for arm macs. I think a bit of both.

I went back to remind myself of the details of the switch from powerpc to intel. It was announced at wwdc 2005 (june) when they released a developer transition kit. The announcement included a commitment to ship computers running x86 by wwdc 2006, so there was pretty much 12 months lead time even for outside developers. Apple also committed to moving to intel fully by the end of 2007, a 30 month total process.

I think Apple is further ahead of the game this time around for how quickly they can go from announcement to shipping product. OS X had been running internally on x86 for years, but this time tons of apple software has been publicly running aarch64 for many years. I do think they need more than 30 months to complete a transition this time around as the user base is much larger and apple may never want to invest the serious dollars it will take to build the giant chips they get from intel. It's one thing to swap out the macbook processor. It's a whole other world to do 130 watt dies.

I'm expecting either wwdc 2019 or 2020 we get an announcement, with products shipping after the OS release in the fall of that year.

Apple's laptop naming has been getting steadily worse since the introduction of the retina macbook pro. The macbook modifying words have lost all meaning when systems labeled pro have major expansion and repair limitations, the device named air isn't the smallest or lightest and the model without a modifier isn't the cheapest. They missed an opportunity to restore some naming sanity this year, but a switch to arm could present it again.

As great as A12X is, it's not touching discrete GPUs and CPUs allowed to burn wattage approaching triple digits. If I was apple I'd lean into this and restore "pro" as a designation that means something. Pro devices would stay x86 and be marketed as supporting more software. Non pro devices would make the jump to arm on their regular update cadence. It would give Apple tons of time to get their custom chips to xeon level scale for core count and interconnects. Even gives apple the option to continue using x86 indefinitely as investing in 100+ watt chips may not have the returns to make it worthwhile. Then the ipad pro becomes poorly named, but I can't solve all of apple's self created problems.

If I was apple this is the mac product matrix I'd have when the dust settles:

macbook: First to move as it's perfect for A12X since it already only has one usb-c and due for a refresh. Drop the intel tax and now it's around $1099. Apple could even use the exact panel from the 12.9 inch ipad minus the touch gear.

macbook air: would need the next generation A chip to support more usb-c and more ram. New sub-$1000 price for the 128 gb model and outrageously long battery life for web browsing or note taking. No need to make it any thinner or lighter.

macbook pro: Kill the weird non-touchbar model that was clearly supposed to be the new air but priced way, way too high. spec bump the 13 and 15 inch, especially discrete GPUs

imac: switch to arm or kill and replace with giant beautiful screen that ipad and iphone docks with.

imac pro: spec bump, but this is as close to a perfect device apple has released in a long time.

mac mini: Use the apple tv case to build an arm mac with A12X or higher that can be sold quite cheap. Use as great PR to give away xcode development systems to schools and developing nations and get swift into the hands of people learning to develop applications

mac mini: relabel as mac mini pro and pretty much keep as is

mac pro: Make it unbelievably expensive but also user repairable, multi GPU on their own standard cards, tons of ram and big xeon chips.