- Yes it makes sense that apple might make such a boot tool that has both versions on it. I don't think it helps anything to have m1 macOS binaries on my intel mbp.
- again, yes it would make sense to have this if you're booting from an external drive. Should be optional to have both binaries though.
- yes, the apps themselves will have binaries for both. That makes sense to me since you want one download link for an app and a lot of users don't want to think about what kind of mac they have.
the OS update tool should be smart enough to just get the OS binaries I need. Unless it's some kind of external boot disk like you mentioned, but that seems like a special case to me.
There were utilities back in the day that stripped out the PowerPC code from fat binaries; I'm sure they'll return for this generation. There's probably a way to do it now from the command line.
Drives were much smaller and slower back then; getting rid of a few megabytes of unused across a bunch of apps could make a difference then.
The first Intel Mac mini in 2006 [1] started with a 60GB, 5400 RPM hard drive, so yeah optimizing space was a big deal back then.
There will come a time when macOS will only be updated for M1 Macs and there won't be a need to ship Intel code any longer. But that's at least 3-4 years away.
- again, yes it would make sense to have this if you're booting from an external drive. Should be optional to have both binaries though.
- yes, the apps themselves will have binaries for both. That makes sense to me since you want one download link for an app and a lot of users don't want to think about what kind of mac they have.
the OS update tool should be smart enough to just get the OS binaries I need. Unless it's some kind of external boot disk like you mentioned, but that seems like a special case to me.