An Apple ISA is coming
To understand Apple today you have to look to the past. Apple ended up being stuck with Motorola's inablity to deliver faster PowerPC chips. Whole product lines were delayed, or not possible. Effectively they gave control on when they could ship new product to a third party.<p>10 years later they are now in the same position with Intel. If Intel delays the next version of its product line by six months then Apple has to put things on hold. This is bad for a company like Apple as it could cause them to miss out on potentially lucrative periods (back to School, the Holiday season etc).<p>Ultimately I suspect in the very near term we will see Apple move off Intel, first for the laptops. LLVM IR would fit this strategy better than fat binaries as Apple would not have to wait until developers recompile. They can have the entire App Store available on day 1 of a product release.