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> They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture.

ARM is older than you may think :) AFAIR the ARM instruction set was developed just a couple years after the Intel 8086, 1983 vs 1978. They're both nearing 40 years, but not that modern x86-64 or ARM64 are the same as those old ISAs.

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True, but ARM, and apple in particular have been willing to discard compatibility with previous generations. I believe the M1 for instance is not 32 bit compatible. ARM also was willing to do some house cleaning when they designed the 64 bit architecture.

X86-64s on the other hand have compatibility not just to 32 bit, but also 16 bit. You can still boot dos 1.0 if you wanted.

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