With Mac desktops and mobile devices getting similar in hardware the question is how much longer it will take, till you can plug your phone to a screen, keyboard and mouse and end up with a decent desktop for most use cases.
(There are tricky questions in that for instance whether one can plug it out for a break or something and how well such a thing would recover and a question whether one would be able to separate work and private life in such a world, but all should be solvable)
imagine your iphone (with its 128 or 256GB) of storage being the storage device of your computer. But not necessarily the CPU. When you're at a more powerful computer (say a laptop or mini), you can plug in and all your processes now run on faster computer. When you want to go remote, you migrate the processes to the portable device.
imagine being able to carry a single computer in your pocket like this betwen home and work and not having to carry a laptop.
http://systems.cs.columbia.edu/files/wpid-compsac2006-fordis...
The screen has a USB A port, so a keyboard and mouse were useable with the dongle. It also has two USB-C ports allowing you to charge the phone through the screen. Touch screen was excellent too.
Dream setup, maybe AMD would hop on the RISC-V or OpenPOWER trains if it does end up looking like x86 is going the way of the dodo.
Unfortunately even that is gone. If you need multiple cores, Pref Watt Scale up with each core adding to it. Unless you want absolute single thread performances. But even that Apple seems to be winning.
We have enter the age of TDP Computing.
ARM is older than you may think :) AFAIR the ARM instruction set was developed just a couple years after the Intel 8086, 1983 vs 1978. They're both nearing 40 years, but not that modern x86-64 or ARM64 are the same as those old ISAs.
X86-64s on the other hand have compatibility not just to 32 bit, but also 16 bit. You can still boot dos 1.0 if you wanted.
Form my point of view, they only need to replace the decoding units and, perhaps, the simd units of a Zen core to have an arm cpu.
ARM is over 30 years old as well.
With full control over the hardware and not relying on Intel for the processor, Apple is aiming to reproduce its iPhone success in PCs. They have everything going for them.
The future looks bleak for Intel and AMD. They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture.
In fact, this is where Apple shines in terms of long-term strategy and execution. They are able to create a revolution with a new product/architecture (iPod, iPhone, iPad and now PC), then iterate to make it evolve over time. In doing so, they create new markets. I really feel like the M1 is an inflection point in the personal computers market.
Can't wait to see how Qualcomm and Nvidia (with the acquisition of ARM), will respond.