If you have a retina macbook pro from 2014~ it definitely makes sense to upgrade to a macbook pro 16" today. The thing will see you through another 5-6y easy.
For most apps it’ll be fine, emulation and cross compiling will be enough. There will be some apps where this isn’t enough though. When the App Store switched to 64-bit, how many apps just disappeared, never to be seen again?
I fully support the transition and I think it’s a logical step for Apple, but it’s going to be one more thing that indie or smaller devs have to worry about. Which means it’s one more thing everyone on this forum has to worry about.
It's not much harder than supporting Linux on x86 and ARM.
It’s trivially easy to compile your iOS app for 64-bit as well, but like I mentioned... that transition left a lot of dead apps in its wake.
Apple is going to change the landscape with a mainstream ARM platform that can compete in specs with Intel desktops and laptops. Let's see what happens then.
The dynamics of proprietary software are somewhat different from open source - unless you make a steady revenue from an app you launched some time ago, there is little incentive to dedicate resources to port it to a new platform (even if it's from 32 to 64 bits) unless you expect it to drive new sales. There is no penalty apart from lost potential revenue and a huge incentive to focus on the next product.
Most of those "dead" apps were not under active development and had no income flow. Making a "trivial" change to an inactive project means rebuilding software which you have shelved for some time.
If you are actively developing software, adding Intel support to a build is pretty much just clicking the option to build a Universal binary. Adding a flag to an existing build a lot easier than dusting off an old app and making a bunch of tweaks and a new build with near zero chance of return on that time invested.
And what user that is ok with a 6 year old computer is interested in spending several thousand on a new macbook that they're going to have to throw out in 3 years? The only user I can imagine that would be ok with the 16" macbook are the users that upgrade every 2-3 years... they can risk it and likely won't lose out on anything except maybe the resale value.
No touchbar instead classic function keys, HDMI output, 2 displayports + 2 usb3 ports, magsafe!, and most importantly a MicroSD drive i have put a Nifty 512GB card into, so i have 768GB of space of which 256 is from the SSD, - works perfectly.
Having a small SD drive is so incredibly useful when you can buy half a terabyte of extra space for $100, granted not that fast but still useful as storage.
The newer models are so incredibly expensive they make no sense to me when they remove features.
... so waiting for the ARM version.
However, I am assuming since the Macbooks are rumored to get ARM as early as late this year, it is likely iMac would follow next year too. The Developer Transition Kit has a Mac Mini with ARM already.
Not really. Pre-2015 Retina MBP are just as efficient and far more flexible than later models.
Wait for ARM.