Leaving aside the economic aspect, would you buy a Mac/MacBook with Apple Silicon?
If not, what would stop you from buying?
I see no reason not to buy (aside from financial concerns, of course).
Surely the ARM MacBooks will have a Cellular version, as Apple will call it, which will attract a lot of people.
Plus, they’ll support x86-64 programs with little to no modification, which will make life easier for regular users, and they’ll have better battery life and performance.
If someday I can afford it, have a steady salary instead of being self-employed, and it’s not extremely expensive, maybe I’ll buy one. 
As soon as they launch an ARM MacBook Pro, I’m buying. I just need it to run Photoshop, Xcode, and Final Cut — which they already showed running during the keynote, so that’s a win. Intel never again.
Regarding the main issue, there is no reason not to buy a MacBook with its own processors, given the experience brought by @barba when using an iPad in their daily life. The limitation was not the architecture and/or performance of the device, but rather the system and available applications; the user experience would not be compromised on a MacBook (okay, if you’ve always used Windows and never had a Mac, you will have to adapt, but that’s not a hardware problem).
Yes, I would buy it.
Yes, absolutely. But one thing that really caught my interest here is: Will we have OS interoperability in the near future? They’ve already said that iOS apps will be able to run on Mac, but will the opposite also be possible? Because then the iPad Pro becomes much more interesting!
At first, I don’t think so, since it’s a transition period. But in a few years, I can see this being announced as the killer feature of WWDC 24.
Apple itself has patents for a “DeX mode” for iPhone and iPad. Now a feature like that makes total sense.
I’ll go further: what if AirPower isn’t just a charger, but also the dock for this?
I work with data analysis and “non-Apple” development, so to speak. I’ll wait to see how things play out, but I think the main tools and languages will soon have native ARM support, which already exists on Linux.
If the performance gains are as high as promised and there aren’t (many) compatibility issues, I don’t see any reason not to switch. I see it as more problematic for those who rely on Bootcamp, but other than that…
If it’s actually proven that performance is better with lower energy consumption, I would indeed buy it. My usage is less concerning since I work more in the browser. Once in a while I need an image editor, but it’s just a matter of time until they transition. I really like macOS and the integration with other devices from the company.
Regarding performance, I wouldn’t doubt that it could match the MacBook Air to a 13" MacBook Pro, but with a battery lasting four days and being thinner.
Craig Federighi himself commented on a podcast that what they achieved with the A12Z for developers to test isn’t even close to what will be delivered to the end consumer.
I believe they’ll start with the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and 24" iMac. What I’m unsure about is how many processors they’ll need.
They’ll need one family for the MacBook, another for the iMac and Mac Mini. Not all can have the same performance. What I imagine is that all will come with the maximum processing configuration, and upgrades will be limited to RAM, internal storage, and afterburner.
I think at first it should be prioritized for those who don’t work heavily with editing and use less established tools…ARM architecture has a clear energy advantage, but it lacks many instructions, which will require more RAM and more time to handle multithreaded tasks, in addition to architecture “conversion” tools charging a considerable performance penalty at the start.
Initially, no. Of course, with everything running natively on ARM, it becomes easier, but we need to remember that macOS has several APIs that don’t exist on iOS, and Apple seems to be precisely concerned with the reverse path. Instead of bringing macOS’s “legacy” technologies to iOS, they’re gradually recreating everything with more modern technologies.
But it’s already much easier to have an app ready for all platforms when it comes to a new application.
Yes! This has been very little discussed in recent years, but the perceived limitations on the iPad/iPhone are merely software-based, not hardware-based. PowerPC itself is much more similar to ARM than Intel, and had no limitations other than not being able to run Windows. Apple itself knows how to pressure developers to create universal binaries that will mitigate the issue and allow levels of performance never before seen in computing devices, because the X86-64 architecture has many compatibility layers with software from the Windows 98 era that cause the system to heat up a lot, and Apple has no issue in maintaining them. It switched to Intel in 2006 because it was a more promising architecture than PowerPC. In 2020, Intel’s difficulty in surpassing 14nm miniaturization made Apple adopt what was necessary to keep evolving. Remember the 2015 MacBook? Without a fan? It was designed for Intel’s 10nm and 7nm chips that should already exist today and were promised back then.
I would buy it if it ran all the apps I usually use; actually, I’d even prefer to go with ARM architecture — it’s the trend.