Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

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Ok, I still have questions.

To start... How would a city with tens of thousands of computers transition to ARM in the near future?

The apps that run 911 Dispatch systems and run critical infrastructure all over the world are all on x86 hardware. Millions if not Billions of dollars in investment, training, and configuration. These are bespoke systems. The military industrial complex basically custom chips and x86. The federal government runs on x86. you think they are just going to say, "Whelp, looks like Apple won, lets quadruple the cost to integrate Apple silicon for our water system and missile systems! They own the stack!"

Professional grade engineering apps and manufacturing apps are just going to suddenly rewrite for apple hardware, because M2 or M3 is sooooo fast? Price matters!!!! Choice Matters!!!

This is solely about consumer choice right now. The cost is prohibitive for most consumers as well, as evidence by the low market penetration of Apple computers to this day.

Notice how the only counter examples you came up with are legacy applications. This is the first sign of a declining market. No, Intel will not go out of business tomorrow. But they are still dead.

The growth markets will drive the price of ARM parts down and performance up. Meanwhile x86 will stagnate and become more and more expensive due to declining volumes. Eventually, yes, this will apply enough pressure even on niche applications like engineering apps to port to ARM. The military will likely be the last holdout.

You make bets on where the puck is going, not on where it currently is.

"How would a city with tens of thousands of HDDs transition to SSDs in the near future?"

It happens over time as products move to compete.

Client side machines matter less, the server will transition to ARM because performance and power is better on RISC. The military industrial complex relies on government cloud contracts with providers that will probably move to ARM on the server side.

It's not necessarily rewriting for Apple hardware, but people that care about future performance will have to move to similar RISC hardware to remain competitive.

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