Proficiency in emulating x86 is just one piece of the puzzle, though. It helped drive M1 adoption to be sure, but users also had a lot of confidence that develo

Proficiency in emulating x86 is just one piece of the puzzle, though. It helped drive M1 adoption to be sure, but users also had a lot of confidence that developers would pull through and provide native binaries in a timely manner, catapulting the capabilities and battery life of their shiny new laptops even further. Apple and third party Mac devs had pulled it off twice already, so there was good reason to believe that they’d do it again. If the new Qualcomm chips have good performance, it’ll drive sales initially, but enthusiasm will fizzle if 2-3 years down the road developers aren’t making meaningful efforts to port their Windows versions to ARM, because a Windows on ARM device running mostly emulated processes is almost certainly going to fall behind M-series Macs running mostly native in performance and battery life. If Qualcomm can’t keep up substantial performance improvements on a yearly cadence, they also risk getting lapped by traditional x86 machines.