That's because the move to ARM Silicon from Intel is a pretty drastic change, almost like a brain transplant. Doing it slowly and carefully is key here, and Apple's been working on the transition for some years now. In fact, there is ARM in MBPs already in the shape of the T2 security chip.
Switching to its own silicon from Intel carries quite some risk, so why would Apple do it?
For starters, Apple has been there and done that three times already. Last time around, swapping to Intel in 2006 from the dead-end PowerPC architecture that Apple worked on with IBM and Motorola arguably saved the Mac computers.
Then there's the ARM ecosystem that started life in Britain first as the Acorn and then Advanced RISC Machine in the mid-eighties with Kiwi David Jaggar working on the design.
ARM has become a global giant, with more than 130 billion cores produced so far and that means Apple has lots of component suppliers to choose from.
Control over the design of processors also matters. Whereas Apple's A-series of chips in i-Devices have consistently maintained a healthy lead over parts from Qualcomm, Samsung and Huawei, Intel processors in Macs haven't been blitzing the competition in the same manner.
Part of the reason is Intel being slow to develop a wafer process finer than 10nm.
A finer chip making process is one factor that boosts performance and lowers power use; Apple is at 5nm already, the first company to do so.
Apple can also add specialised circuitry like the 16-core neural network engine in the A14, to speed up specific software.
Then there's Intel not getting anywhere with 5G modems, forcing Apple to make legal peace with Qualcomm for the next six years so that it can buy radios for iDevices.
There's no question that the ARM Mac will be fast: the new iPad Air with a six-core A14 Bionic system easily beats out a 13-inch mid-2018 MacBook Pro with an four-core Intel Core i7 at 2.7GHz by up to 50 per cent in Geekbench 5 tests.
As a curious aside, the Geekbench 5 top spots are taken by an iMac Pro with a 16-core 3.5GHz AMD engineering sample processor, rather than the Intel Xeon part that Apple sells the computers with currently.
What that means remains to be seen, but AMD is a long-standing rival of Intel and its Ryzen range of processors are very competitive. The company also introduced 7nm processors in 2019, with 5nm promised next year.
AMD and Intel are both x86-64 instruction set processors, and able to run the same software, mostly with very little changes needed. ARM and x86-64 are chalk and cheese though, and there's the Rosetta 2 translator between the two until applications get rewritten for Apple Silicon.
While Rosetta 2 is clever tech, it introduces a level of complexity and overhead which power users and weary developers will be suspicious of. A seamless transition for x86-64 software running on Apple Silicon is crucial.
The same goes for hardware: the iPad Pro or even the new iPad Air with the Magic keyboard with a touchpad for mousing, the Pencil and good cameras are great mobile all rounders for work and play.
They are not clamshell MacBooks though, and I know plenty of people who'd rather switch to Windows laptops than go with iPads. Apple might be brave but I can't see it being foolhardy enough to enrage its more conservative customers by ditching MacBooks.
Will there be Apple Silicon based iMacs too, or is AMD destined to go into those?
Apart from a smooth transition to Apple Silicon, the biggest thing I'd like to see from the switch is not so much speedy hardware, but much longer battery life for portables.
In a way it's good to be forced to take a break to find a charging spot but Apple's been stuck at 9-10 hours quoted battery life for ages, and pushing that out to 12 or more hours would be great.
