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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I get your point, but I think the M1 is more significant as proof of what is possible than because I think everyone will buy a Mac.

I can absolutely see Qualcomm offering laptop chips off the back of the M1's success. They may not be as good, but they might be much cheaper. I can also see Microsoft pushing Windows on ARM harder, and rolling out their own chips at some point.

Also once the market gets "used to" multi-architecture software (again), I think we'll see a renaissance of chip design as many more players crop up, because of the lower barrier to entry.

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Maybe. Apple has solved the chicken and egg problem regarding software compatibility by forcing everyone to move on to ARM in the near future. Microsoft will not abandon x64 though, so there are far less incentives to port things. Also Microsoft cares far more about compatibility (e.g. 32-bit software). That means means a lot of things will run under a Rosetta 2 like system (probably less efficient if you need to support 32-bit as well). If you add the fact that Qualcomm is unlikely to match Apple in performance, the resulting product might not be very appealing compared to a classic x64 system.

An ARM transition isn't a fait accompli just because Apple introduced M1 at the lower end of the Mac lineup. There's a huge lump of inertia there.

> An ARM transition isn't a fait accompli just because Apple introduced M1 at the lower end of the Mac lineup. There's a huge lump of inertia there.

If you're just referring to Apple's future, the endgame is already a done deal. They don't roll back something this fundamental once it's public.

Their last Intel computers will be manufactured and sold within 3 years; I'd wager a month's salary on that if I had it lying around.

If they can't make it perform at the top level like AMD, which seems unlikely but obviously it's too soon to tell, they'll make up for it in other ways or simply live with the performance hit until they can.

Apple doesn't believe in inertia. Their partners and customers can either make the transition or get left behind. Microsoft's business model depends on making enterprises happy; Apple doesn't care.

True, but Apple has been the harbinger for a LARGE number of advances in consumer computing adoption. Mouse/windows desktop interface? Apple. Font libraries? Apple. USB? Apple. Touch interfaces? Apple. Modern smartphone? Apple.

The list goes on and on. M1 could be such a harbinger. Who knows if anyone else can compete, and likely Apple will be in the pole position for some time, but Apple has shown everyone it can be done.

At WWDC last year they made it clear that every Mac is going to run on ARM eventually.

I'm not so sure, since a lot of software is somewhat cross-platform now anyway. You need to port the JVM, .NET, and Chromium (for electron), and you've effectively ported a large part of the desktop application space already.

Web applications are portable if you have a browser

Many modern languages that compile to native, like Rust, trivially recompile for multiple target architectures.

Others are dynamic and don't need recompilation.

Of course some major software is written in non-portable C and C++. But the question is whether some emulation isn't acceptable here.

Porting the JVM to a new CPU architecture is hard but it has already been done for AArch64.

I know, I'm just thinking in today's day and age an architecture change isn't that hard anymore. We're already paying for all these abstractions, why not use them.

I don't think that there is a high performance JVM implementation for RISC-V. A vendor would have to do a lot more work if they picked an architecture other than AArch64.

Large parts of Windows 10 are still Win32 not UWP.

They can't even remove decades old legacy code from their own products, so good luck everyone else.

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