Don't underestimate just how much work they had to do to go 64-bit. It was not "Oh crap...we've got to have something to brag about...let's make the processor 64-bit". Apple had to develop a power-efficient ARMv8 64-bit processor atop their Swift work,
2 years in advance of ARM releasing the ARM A57, host all the work necessary to get LLVM compiling, linking and debugging on their new processor, upgrade XCode's infrastructure, port all of iOS (which is similar to OS X, but it's definitely NOT OS X for x86), upgrade all of their frameworks and base apps to 64-bit and QA the whole lot in secrecy. I wouldn't be surprised if they've been working on this for at least 3 years already.
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