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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

Creative class is a lot more than programmers. Look at boutique system integrators like Puget Systems... do you see Apple/ARM Hardware? Heck no you don't! These guys sell hardware to a LOT of the companies that comprise the credits in movie production, game production, laboratories, university science departments, ML researchers, big energy, and soooooo much more.

These guys are not rewriting their software stack for thin chassis, thermal limited, and non-repairable hardware. Raytheon doesn't buy Apple/ARM hardware for their simulations, design and development. Does Boeing, Airbus, Ford or Caterpillar run on Apple/ARM hardware? Are these companies just chomping at the bit to ditch their legacy stacks? I don't think so.

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> Creative class is a lot more than programmers.

I'm not sure anyone thinks programmers when they think creative class. That's like saying the professional athlete class is a lot more than just Pokemon Go players...

Yes that's very much the more artistic side aka graphic designers, it smacks of doing an easy "olgy" degree or even a "PPE".

The sort who work in traditional professional jobs and who shudder at the thought of the "boffins" and greasy "engineers" .

Recall yesterdays conversation about European pay rates for developers.

Isn't creative class just people who make things without consuming raw materials? I think it includes consultants, "knowledge workers", etc. in its original formulation, not just artists.

The parent comment didn’t say “we’ll all be using Apple”

He said ARM.

I edited my comment as I think in the context of the larger discussion, ARM and Apple are basically interchangeable.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Apple is probably the "first, best" case of ARM, but there's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from making a similar investment in ARM hardware. Indeed, Amazon is already doing so with Graviton, and we're seeing similar improvements in both raw speed and in perf/watt like what we're seeing with M1 chips vs. Intel[0]. And that's one of the best parts of ARM -- the design itself is available for licensing, unlike x86, so anyone can pony up the cash and build up their own customized chips that maintain compatibility with base ARM code (maybe needing a recompile to take advantage of new hardware features).

[0] https://dev.to/dnx/arm-vs-intel-a-real-world-comparison-usin...

ARM, not Apple. They are not the same thing.

Right now they pretty much are.

Raytheon etc don't buy them yet.

But the M1 is already a huge hit in the music and design community, which is pro-performance oriented. If subsequent Mnx chips provide enough of a speed bump they're going to destroy the high end Xeon market.

You've named two industries where Apple have histrionically been really popular, mostly because of their software rather than for any particular performance reason. They'd all buy the latest, Apple product whatever was inside because that's the only one Apple is going to support going forward. The idea of real high-performance computing moving to ARM is entirely dependent on there being suitable good software support, which currently does not exist (at least in my industry there is nothing yet and the vendors move very slowly). This "destruction" might eventually come but it won't be any time soon and Intel will of course react in the meantime.

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