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

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.