Current MacBook Airs already get full-day battery life. Apple/ARM and Intel are quickly converging from two sides – but the cost of switching architectures (while something Apple certainly has been quite good at in the past) seems too high to me for the payoff, and that’s even if, spec for spec, ARM could beat out Intel. Add to that that the relationship of Apple with Intel seems to be a quite good one (so there is no reason for petty politics) and I really don’t see it happening.
24 hour battery life (instead of 12) and half the performance in a MacBook Air seems hardly worth it to me. To my mind that device is already more constrained by performance than battery life.
(Conversely I also don’t see ARM/Apple getting too slow to keep pace with Intel on the mobile side, so I don’t see them switching there to Intel, either.)
Apple owns a stake in ARM and likely has more influence on their direction than they would with Intel. Apple is fond of controlling their destiny and that means controlling the entire stack. They might keep iOS and OSX separate but I could definitely see them unifying hardware across all their lines as much as possible. They avoid the margin paid to Intel and can lower costs via scale.
e: I know they had a stake in ARM at one point, but I'm unsure if they still do.
24 hour battery life (instead of 12) and half the performance in a MacBook Air seems hardly worth it to me. To my mind that device is already more constrained by performance than battery life.
(Conversely I also don’t see ARM/Apple getting too slow to keep pace with Intel on the mobile side, so I don’t see them switching there to Intel, either.)