> Plenty have tried this whole mainstream ARM thing before, and all of them have failed, or at least not succeeded in the way they thought
It's pretty hard to find a mobile phone which isn't running an ARM variant, and these days, the functional gap between a computer and a smartphone is rapidly narrowing.
Hell, the odds are good that your smartphone has a significantly higher-resolution display than your laptop or PC!
Beyond that, it's worth bearing in mind that Apple isn't using standard ARM chips. They're using their own heavily tweaked and tuned chips which are based on ARM. And since everything - including the GPU - is in-house, they're able to tweak and tune their software for their specific hardware, rather than having to cover all the bases in the way that Android/Microsoft/Linux has to.
Then too, they've already got a tried, tested and proven hardware architecture, in the shape of the iPhone and iPad. The only real difference is that they're sticking a new OS atop - though even then, it's one that (at least originally) was based on FreeBSD and designed to be platform-agnostic...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
