So Apple confirmed it at WWDC this week: the Mac is moving off Intel to Apple's own ARM-based silicon, with the first machines promised by the end of the year and the whole transition meant to take a couple of years. Everyone has a take. Mine is narrow and slightly self-interested, because I do not actually care very much which CPU is in a laptop. I care about what it does to the build.
The demo of x86 software running under the Rosetta 2 translation layer was the part I watched closely, and it looked smoother than I expected. But translation is the compatibility blanket, not the destination. The real question for anyone shipping software is how long the long tail of native ARM builds takes, and how much of your CI you can suddenly no longer assume.
For a lot of us the Mac is a development machine that is expected to produce Linux binaries that run on x86 servers. If the laptop is ARM and the server is x86, the cosy days of just building locally and shipping it are over. Cross-compilation and containerised builds stop being a nicety and become the default. The languages with first-class cross-compilation, Go among them, are going to feel very comfortable. The ones with native dependencies and fragile toolchains are going to have a long year.
I am not rushing to buy the first one. I am, quietly, glad someone with Apple's leverage is going to drag the whole ecosystem into taking ARM seriously, because the rest of us have been pretending it was a phone-only concern for too long.