“Binary translation” to be pedantic, but, I agree. I was an Adobe user through the PPC->Intel transition, and that worked OK, though my subjective remembered e

“Binary translation” to be pedantic, but, I agree. I was an Adobe user through the PPC->Intel transition, and that worked OK, though my subjective remembered experience says non-x86 apps felt a bit pokey. (This was a while ago, and I could very well be wrong, but we had PPC and Intel iMacs at my college newspaper, and the G5 felt faster in my memory.) But that was also a transition to a dual-core Core 2 Duo machine, which was obviously unambiguously faster than a single-core G5, so there was computational room to spare to deal with the translation. It was not a done deal that x86->ARM would as smooth of a transition, as we figured ARM would be a bit faster, but not a generational leap. But here we are, Apple really managed to make binary translation work well this time, and Intel applications are plenty snappy. Which is impressive. (I also wonder how much of that is having a really fast SSD so the translation of the app is not as I/O bound.) And I don’t think legacy x86 apps will be as much of a thing this time around. Back in the PPC days, lots of applications were built using Metrowerks CodeWarrior toolchain, which didn’t come across the divide, so big applications had to scramble to get everything into Xcode. This time, if an application made it past the evolutionary bottleneck of needing to be 64-bit only for Catalina, it’s probably close to ready to go for ARM.