A few years ago (with COVID-related time-dilation, 5 years is now ‘a few’) I wrote a blog post about the then-imminent iMac Pro comparing it to the first crossover. Back then, I wrote:

The iMac Pro […] is the AMC Eagle. It’s the first Mac to be car-first, run by the A-series processor which then boots the legacy Intel hardware. For now, it will (like the Eagle) only provide a few benefits to security. Eventually, this will become the way all mainstream computers are built…

It was the first mainstream computer to use a mobile chip in a primary role — taking the A10 processor out of the iPhone 7. Most computers at the time were descended from the proverbial ‘truck’ — even the lightest laptops were using processors for heavy-duty computing evolved to work in a smaller computer. That iMac in 2017 heralded an era when computers would be based primarily on chips originally designed for phones and then scaled up to power laptops and desktops.

A few weeks ago, Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo found a software update that contained the code for Apple’s upcoming iMac Pro. Confirming some earlier rumors, it appears that the iMac will have both an Intel processor, as previously announced, and an A10 — the Apple-designed processor powering the iPhone 7. Inevitably, someone will soon bring up the famous quote from Steve Jobs about how traditional desktop computing is a truck, and iOS devices are the cars that everyone will use from now on. In this case, it seems even more appropriate than most.

Each September, Apple releases a new version of iOS to a chorus of cheers from the average user, and a series of frustrated blog posts by the more technically-inclined. Every crash, sync failure, or edge case is held aloft as evidence of Apple's slow decline into irrelevancy. Jokes reference Marco Arment's (since-retracted) post on the increase in weird bugs in Apple's software. Screenshots abound of weird behavior. Sarcastic tweets are retweeted, quote tweeted, debated, and debunked. Flame wars spread across the internet, as people either argue that Apple and its products are in a decline akin to the Roman Empire after the sack of Rome or vehemently deny there's a problem like Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

And nobody noticed.

In OS X Lion, Apple introduced Gatekeeper, which prevented unsigned code from running on a Mac without explicit user approval. During the period between announcement and release, the typical barrage of thought-pieces and angry Tweets were published — most tended towards a cautious optimism that Apple had left users and developers enough headroom. Users could bypass all of the protections with a single click, while Developers could still choose to distribute software, signed or not, through whatever channel they chose.