The Mac has been through several major architecture changes in the past , from the original Motorola 680 x 0 to PowerPC to Intel , and each time Apple has provided compatibility layers e . g , Rosetta to make sure that old apps are still supported during the transition period . It would definitely be painful and there will always be casualties , but anything important like Photoshop or Live or whatever would be ported to the new architecture very quickly . The biggest roadblock would probably be dual booting or emulating Windows , since even with a very good compatibility layer you ' re still going to have bottlenecks and slowdowns that will make using Windows on ARM Macs a little less simple . Whether it happens or not who knows , but Apple definitely isn ' t a stranger to doing stuff like this .