That wouldn't change at all. The newly separated software company would get appropriate hardware specs and prototypes during the same timeline they do today (as a vertically integrated branch of Apple).
So instead of working together , the software team would work in isolation and then when they are finished they deliver to the hardware company and keep going back and forth? Yeah that’s going to work out real well. Let’s just look how well it work for Android.
I am saying that Apple has a software and hardware division that work in concert.
Chris Lattner, the inventor of the Swift programming language and the open source LLVM was once interviewed on the Accidental Tech Podcast and he was asked whether bytecode could be used to allow Apple to switch architectures without forcing them to require developers to recompile and still have native compilation. He made up some half truth about whether that would be possible.
Years later when the S chips in the Apple Watch became 64 bit, he admitted that at the time of the interview, he knew that the 64 bit S chip was on the roadmap internally and he designed the LLVM with that in mind.
That’s what happens when you have software and hardware teams working together. The same is true with Nvidia and the their software developers who design Cuda and Intel and the compiler makers.
There were also reports that the software team responsible for the JS engine in WebKit worked with the processor team and the processor team did some design work around Apple’s ARM variants to make JS pre compilation faster.
This is also the whole idea of VLIW architectures where the processor manufacture depends on a team of compiler makers to ring out efficiencies and they work closely together.
Heck even back in the Apple // days, Woz a developer, designed hardware and software together.
