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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

>Apple is in a unique position of being able to force a new architecture on its customers, without losing them.

Apple's, in marketing speak, brand permission has given them extraordinary latitude over the past 15 to 20 years. They've been able to get off with making abrupt transitions and other relatively wrenching choices that tech pubs and doubtless forums like this wailed about but which their customers were mostly fine with. Things that Microsoft and WinTel laptops, for example, couldn't with respect to ports, limited options, etc. couldn't.

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The difference there is Apple's customer is the actual end customer, the user, while Microsoft's customer is the OEM. It's the OEM Microsoft sell the software to (generally speaking), and who actually decides what devices get made and what their features are, not Microsoft.

As a result Microsoft has to worry about what the OEMs want and how they will use the product. In contrast Apple only cares what the end user wants, what their experience is, what features they get and how they work.

An OEM cares about whether they're making ARM laptops or Intel laptops. They care about and want input into the implementation details. An end user doesn't care if Photoshop is running on an ARM chip or an Intel chip, they care about how well it runs and what the battery life is. They (generally speaking) don't care about the implementation details.

Apple moved from 68k to PPC, and then to Intel. Binary transitions like those are not new, and are made easier by an OS that is architecture agnostic from very early on.

It's not so hard for the OS to be architecture agnostic. Linux runs on lots of architectures, and also Windows NT was portable enough to run on MIPS early on and also runs on ARM in addition to x86.

The main challenge is seamlessly migrating users to the new platform and Apple did a great job at it using Rosetta.

Both Linux and especially Windows struggle at this because they lack something as well integrated as Rosetta and require all applications to be recompiled to a new architecture.

Microsoft could have ported Office to MIPS, Alpha, PPC, and Itanium. I don’t think IE ever had a PPC port. The same applies to Visual Studio. When Alphas started appearing, that’s all I needed to be happy - a way to use email, to browse the web and use Altavista, and Visual Studio so I could write programs. It’d be a different story.

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