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For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there),

For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there), and you need some way to make legacy x86/x86_64 applications to run smoothly to get over the chicken-egg effect, and you need some way for all the legacy hardware devices that people plug in into their computers. Apple could do it not just because of their experience from the iOS device family and the IP they acquired for it, but because they didn't need to take care that much about the issues in the Windows ecosystem. Apple has long since discouraged third party hardware that can't be driven with libusb from userspace as kexts have been deprecated, Apple has been pretty ruthless in forcing developers to keep their software compileable, and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks and extensions to make performant emulation of x86 code possible.

MisterTea 1y ago
Well the architectural backwards compatibility issues are Apple's problem really. I was thinking of a pure Arm machine running Linux/BSD/9.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The problem is, without the backwards compatibility and a high-performance core design, the customer base is really, really small - and that's the reason (in addition to Qualcomm having had an exclusivity agreement with MS, but only putting out crap designs) why every attempt of pushing a non-x86 Windows machine so far just completely and utterly failed. The lower/ultra-low end market is a different thing - just look at the absurdly massive popularity of Raspberry Pi and their clones - but as said these are toys, not capable of being an actually usable general (as in: general population) computing device.
joshuaissac 1y ago
> and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks FWIW, both Intel and AMD also have architectural licences from ARM.

MisterTea 1y ago

Well the architectural backwards compatibility issues are Apple's problem really. I was thinking of a pure Arm machine running Linux/BSD/9.

mschuster91 1y ago
The problem is, without the backwards compatibility and a high-performance core design, the customer base is really, really small - and that's the reason (in addition to Qualcomm having had an exclusivity agreement with MS, but only putting out crap designs) why every attempt of pushing a non-x86 Windows machine so far just completely and utterly failed. The lower/ultra-low end market is a different thing - just look at the absurdly massive popularity of Raspberry Pi and their clones - but as said these are toys, not capable of being an actually usable general (as in: general population) computing device.

joshuaissac 1y ago

> and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks FWIW, both Intel and AMD also have architectural licences from ARM.