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The comment above mine said, > Apple has solved the chicken and egg problem regarding software compatibility by forcing everyone to move on to ARM in the near

The comment above mine said, > Apple has solved the chicken and egg problem regarding software compatibility by forcing everyone to move on to ARM in the near future. I don't see "everyone" moving to ARM in the near future. I don't even see myself buying an Apple Silicon machine in the near future. I don't see corporate users going to ARM in the near future, and I certainly don't see government users going to ARM in the near future. Even if the Mac lineup goes exclusively to ARM in two years as planned, I'd be shocked if Dell, Lenovo, and other manufacturers follow suit. Lenovo just announced that the fully specced Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 will run on an Intel 11th Gen CPU. They're not even going to AMD, let alone ARM. Apple switched to Intel from PowerPC for a reason. Apart from raw performance at that time, Intel's draw was practical: dual boot, software compatibility, and so forth. Now, Apple is leaving Intel because the lithography has fallen behind, the chips run hot, Intel's share of the profit eats into Apple's profit margins, and x86 impedes their dream of iOS/MacOS app singularity. However, the masses are not clamoring for a move away from x86, so there's no pent-up demand to be had with a switch to ARM. Let's assume that Apple follows through on its two-year plan to offer an exclusively ARM Mac lineup. What's the bear case? If Apple is the only player to move to ARM, and the market doesn't follow, it could end up as the first existential setback that the Mac has faced in a long time. In my view, Apple has been out of touch with Mac users for a while now. When they eliminated MagSafe for Macbooks, users shrugged. When they introduced TouchBar, users stared blankly. When they removed all but one format of accessory port, users groaned. When they introduced the butterfly keyboard that put thinness above function, users complained. Eventually if you make enough weird moves, you start to alienate customers. There are bound to be gaps in the respective software libraries of x86 and ARM, and that is going to matter to regular folks and application-specific power users alike. Apple itself is having problems getting Big Sur to run properly on all the machines it supports. "Supported" 2013 and 2014 machines are getting bricked, and even brand-new machines are experiencing bugs with basic functions like managing external displays. I can attest that Intel-based 2020 four-port MBP13s were still shipping with Catalina at the end of December (I don't know if that has changed in the past two weeks). If the OS itself is having problems, that isn't exactly a good sign for the applications that run atop it. Apple has gotten used to saying "whatever, I do what I want," and getting its way. Remember 3.5mm audio ports on flagship mobile phones? Me neither. But what happens if complacency about that kind of market power carries Apple a bridge too far? They will have been so used to success that they will miss the early signs of market distaste, and may be unable to adapt mid-flight. There's a certain sense of bravado and self-fulfilling prophecy in saying that -- come what may -- the Mac is moving to Apple Silicon, but it'd be smarter to eschew the bravado and see how things go with the M1 before announcing plans to transition the entire lineup. So to answer your question, I was talking about ARM vs x86 in general. A transition from x86 to ARM isn't something that one firm with minority market share can force unilaterally. However, I also think the Apple Silicon two-year timeline is overly ambitious and that Apple risks losing market share as a result. If that happens, the stock will suffer drastically, and there will be a reshaping of Apple's C-suite.

macintux 6y ago
I agree Apple's in a tough spot, facing multiple risks with the transition, but if they waffle they become Microsoft, and they can't afford that. If they express any interest in keeping Intel around, the transition is at great risk, because software developers can just trust that Rosetta will continue to make their software work, and customers will keep buying Intel machines that Apple will have to support for years to come. And I believe that was what the parent was saying: > Apple has solved the chicken and egg problem regarding software compatibility by forcing everyone to move on to ARM in the near future. Clearly there's no way that every computer user is going to be moving to ARM, but every new macOS user will, so the sentence only makes sense in the narrow scope of Apple customers.
- totalZero 6y ago
  I certainly don't claim to know what the author meant when those words were written. What I know is that Apple serves and represents an influential minority of the personal computing market, other manufacturers are unveiling new machines that run on Intel, and even Apple hasn't put out a single high-end machine with ARM. I personally haven't been forced onto ARM; I bought an Intel Macbook Pro after the M1 release. You're absolutely right that the challenge is to get developers to build software that doesn't just depend on Rosetta 2. But at present, a developer has to think about users on x86 Windows, x86 MacOS, ARM MacOS, and Linux (ignoring ARM64 Windows and a few other OSes). The ARM MacOS devices at present are lower-end -- 2 TB3 ports, etc -- and less likely to be used by the customer cohorts that are the most profitable for software developers (except maybe the big-ticket names like Office, Photoshop, etc). I run x86 Mac and I still can't run all the APIs and software that I want to use. M1 would be totally untenable for me. For example, I use a brokerage whose software runs on Windows, but they have a cloud version that runs on Citrix Receiver. That used to work for me on Mojave, but I haven't been able to get it running on Catalina. I don't think Apple has solved the chicken-and-egg problem, not even within the Apple landscape. If anything, Apple has made the problem more pressing and relevant by introducing a two-year cliff. As Ludacris says, "tomorrow's not promised today." It's unwise to treat every large market segment as massless. Forced market shifts and state changes can be a neat trick when Apple pulls them off, but eventually they'll hit an immovable object. A two-year timeframe is an eternity for PCs and semiconductors; moreover, demand is astronomical at present, but the term structure of that demand is anything but predictable right now. Apple is going to be supporting x86 Mac well past that two-year timeline, so even if ARM Mac takes over on schedule, developers are going to have to build for both setups for some time to come. I don't think that's particularly prohibitive if you set up your abstraction layers and work on one shared core before tailoring it to fit your supported platforms, but it's definitely added work and more planning.

macintux 6y ago

I agree Apple's in a tough spot, facing multiple risks with the transition, but if they waffle they become Microsoft, and they can't afford that. If they express any interest in keeping Intel around, the transition is at great risk, because software developers can just trust that Rosetta will continue to make their software work, and customers will keep buying Intel machines that Apple will have to support for years to come. And I believe that was what the parent was saying: > Apple has solved the chicken and egg problem regarding software compatibility by forcing everyone to move on to ARM in the near future. Clearly there's no way that every computer user is going to be moving to ARM, but every new macOS user will, so the sentence only makes sense in the narrow scope of Apple customers.

totalZero 6y ago
I certainly don't claim to know what the author meant when those words were written. What I know is that Apple serves and represents an influential minority of the personal computing market, other manufacturers are unveiling new machines that run on Intel, and even Apple hasn't put out a single high-end machine with ARM. I personally haven't been forced onto ARM; I bought an Intel Macbook Pro after the M1 release. You're absolutely right that the challenge is to get developers to build software that doesn't just depend on Rosetta 2. But at present, a developer has to think about users on x86 Windows, x86 MacOS, ARM MacOS, and Linux (ignoring ARM64 Windows and a few other OSes). The ARM MacOS devices at present are lower-end -- 2 TB3 ports, etc -- and less likely to be used by the customer cohorts that are the most profitable for software developers (except maybe the big-ticket names like Office, Photoshop, etc). I run x86 Mac and I still can't run all the APIs and software that I want to use. M1 would be totally untenable for me. For example, I use a brokerage whose software runs on Windows, but they have a cloud version that runs on Citrix Receiver. That used to work for me on Mojave, but I haven't been able to get it running on Catalina. I don't think Apple has solved the chicken-and-egg problem, not even within the Apple landscape. If anything, Apple has made the problem more pressing and relevant by introducing a two-year cliff. As Ludacris says, "tomorrow's not promised today." It's unwise to treat every large market segment as massless. Forced market shifts and state changes can be a neat trick when Apple pulls them off, but eventually they'll hit an immovable object. A two-year timeframe is an eternity for PCs and semiconductors; moreover, demand is astronomical at present, but the term structure of that demand is anything but predictable right now. Apple is going to be supporting x86 Mac well past that two-year timeline, so even if ARM Mac takes over on schedule, developers are going to have to build for both setups for some time to come. I don't think that's particularly prohibitive if you set up your abstraction layers and work on one shared core before tailoring it to fit your supported platforms, but it's definitely added work and more planning.