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Ford or GM sell vehicles with engines taylored to customer needs. Given the volumes of chips Apple ships to the end customer, why can't they offer 6 kinds of chip architecture like the choice in colored metal finish? Why does it have to be one chip's ISA one generation at a time?

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In your colored car analogy all cars use the same fuel. An Apple computer with a different chip arch will use different software. Yes fat binary are a thing but anyway all different archs should be tested separately. This is a real bummer especially for small dev shops.

I would expect emulation to be perfectly sufficient for testing purposes?

The big down-side is that they'd end up with really fat binaries and edge case bugs in some apps across architectures.

Apple can pivot architectures, but I don't think they do it lightly.

Modern MacOS and iOS app size is completely dominated by image and other media assets. The code is down in the noise.

This is not true; most popular iOS apps have very large binary sizes.

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