When I started high school–20 years ago next month–there were about ten of us out of 500 students in the school who had Macs. We somehow all got to know each other and shared software and support for the frequent file compatibility issues we all had when working on homework assignments in a Windows XP dominated world. It was kind of a fun community, if also a bit of a support group.

It’s been interesting to watch things shift in the time since, the switch from PowerPC to Intel in the late 2000s seemed to be a sea change moment where suddenly more people were using Macs. I guess the ability to use Windows in a pinch made it a safer choice, and not having a CPU architecture barrier and an OS barrier made it easier to make software for both systems. Obviously we’re in very different times but I’m interested to see how the M1 transition plays out over the next few years. I’ve been surprised so far at how slow it has been for a lot of developer tooling to make the jump–I’ve dead ended at an open Github issue many times trying to help coworkers on M1 get something running locally.

I guess I’m a glutton for compatibility issues, as nowadays everyone I know uses a Mac but I’m running Linux.