x86 is dragging around a fairly archaic architecture because of 'backward compatibility'. You'd laugh at some of the things we had to do on the instruction level to coax better performance on these systems.

Apple, as an integrated systems company (they make the hardware, the OS, the compilers, and many applications) can throw an old processor architecture out - the same way they moved from PowerPC (RISC) to x86. Good on them!

I'm hoping we see some competitive architectures from Intel and/or AMD, and some company that makes OSs and compilers gets on board. Intel tried this with Itanium (EPIC) some decades ago, and MSoft had a version of W7/64 that ran on it, but it just wasn't compelling enough to shift everything over.