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Comment by jbirer | Hacker News Reader

Absolute disaster, this platform. The opacity and lack of early availability for development made for a really ugly adoption experience. I feel that people should not encourage this and vote with their money in the DevOps / Dev sector to discourage other companies from pulling the same stunt.

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The expectation that a ~2 month old platform is going to perfectly replicate the functionality of 30+ year old platforms is absurd.

Compared to the PPC->Intel transition, this is a cakewalk. Compared to Microsoft's (multiple attempts) to migrate to ARM, this is a true triumph.

It's pretty good for a hardware platform. But I guess if you're a frontend developer, 2 months is enough for a new JavaScript framework to come out, become ubiquitous, get superseded, and get abandoned as legacy code.

Lack of early availability? They sold $500 dev units specifically for this purpose.

They were not available for purchase by everyone.

Other than being unavailable outside the US, I'm pretty sure everyone who ordered one received it. Apple also donated at least a few of them to OSS projects.

They were available outside of the US, too.

If they were available for purchase to non-developers, how would that be early availability? That would just be a release.

If they were available to every developer, Docker would not have been this late.

The devkits were available for everyone who asked one, but the A12Z didn't have hardware virtualization.

Unfortunately the dev kits were lacking virtualization that Docker needs so they've had to do this port in the last month.

They’re still selling Intel versions of every single Mac except the MacBook Air...

Docker or M1 macs?

The M1 Macs. Docker is awesome.

How do you think this transition has gone badly?

For the average, normal human, they won't notice which platform they're on. Only someone with a niche need will have any issues. and those issues are being fixed rapidly.

While there are definitely gotchas and considerations, i've seen people say there will never be audio software on m1 in the next 2 years. there's already daws with m1 support and bridging for vsts being released.

So, it's hard to buy into the idea this platform transition has been so horrible you'd abandon using macs.

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