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To give a different perspective: I find Apple's move to ARM the most exciting thing to happen in desktop computers in many years. I'm typing this from a PC running Win10. Current plan is: as soon as ARM desktop Macs become available (and assuming they don't screw it up in some weird way), I'd like to switch.

discuss

mey|5 years ago

If it's ARM that excites you, Surface Pro X (Windows) and Pinebook (Linux) exist today. If it's macOS, you could switch now. What about the combo of macOS + ARM do you find compelling?

ajconway|5 years ago

Windows app developers couldn't care less about ARM Windows. MacOS app developers will have to if they want to stay relevant.

kube-system|5 years ago

Because of the network effects of software development. The number of people that use those devices you list is basically a rounding error, so they're ignored by most software development.

Apple has a monopoly on their hardware, and they will likely sell a significant number of devices. This will lead to a lot more development for ARM that never would have happened otherwise.

That, in turn, may make tilt the balance in favor of ARM for a lot of other use cases outside of OSX when other tools, applications, and hardware vendors better support ARM.

yjftsjthsd-h|5 years ago

So, and I say this as someone who's stoked to see any non-x86 system going mainstream... why do you want to switch? What benefit do you see to switching to an ARM laptop? Or is it just "this is a good thing (in general) so I want to get on board with it"?

starsinspace|5 years ago

I'm also excited about a non-x86 architecture on the desktop again. Monoculture is bad, and I find x86 to be especially ugly...

As for switching... I'm increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's complete disregard of user privacy. Apple isn't perfect with that either, but IMO much better at least. For my use cases, Win and Mac are the only credible options due to software availability. So to get away from Windows.. there's not much choice these days.

dehrmann|5 years ago

Having an x86 dev machine is useful because it matches most production environments pretty closely. This might be changing somewhat with AWS Graviton, it's not the default yet.

What makes ARM so exciting? Maybe battery use will be better? Maybe it will be slightly faster? Maybe? There's also been a lot of tuning done for laptop workloads on x86, it's definitely a maybe. I expect the only noticeable changes for most users to be somewhat better battery life, some apps not working, and occasionally having to know which package to download.