Yes, but we are the cool 1%.
$1000 "arm board" with impressive power and performance envelopes will get you some market share, especially if the existing ecosystem bends to the manufacturer's will. As they do.
I fully expect the first company to really try and make an impressive risc-V workstation to clean up in that market, especially with people like myself that use higher end consumer parts as servers.
It's just a different software stack (OS, Drivers, Window management/UI, Sound, Networking, file access). It has similar barriers/differences in Linux. It requires extra build/compile pipelines at the minimum and most cases it means some refactoring of your code. In the worst case your gfx/audio/netcode is just plain incompatible (hard coded for a Windows/DirectX stack), meaning you have to rewrite quite a bit to abstract away the differences. This counts even in unity, it just helps here and there with making it cross platform and enforcing an opinion. These guys didn't use much of Unity and seems to use unity just as a rendering pipeline.
People who buy macs tend not to game on them much, they buy it for other reasons. I think people who owns macs and play games, tend to have consoles or even a gaming rig (since they can most likely also afford those to begin with).
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Right?
I may be straying away from M1-related issues now, but I've also been seeing widespread Linux-style "why can't I share my screen?"-type problems. Not to mention fear of installing new updates and things breaking. It's like Mac is now the worst of both worlds of old Windows and Linux.
To be fair, I'm not actually a Mac user - this is just stuff I've been observing from the outside.
(+) Impressive performance while staying literally quiet and cool all the time. My MBP's fans kicked in only once—when using ffmpeg. This in itself has pushed the industry forward. We shall see what Intel and AMD have to offer soon.
(-) Apple is obviously, well, Apple. They broke some things that used to work perfectly (or things for which there used to be a workaround). Apple is pushing a vision for user experience, which tbh, is not always ideal, but I get that. For this vision, they sacrifice so many things along the way (see this for example: https://medium.com/@parttimeben/mac-it-just-works-horribly-c...).
Docker has been working well for me. But I agree that some changes (esp. M1) have made macOS feel a bit like Linux.
In short; it started out rocky, but, if you are careful and use only native application so Rosetta doesn’t kick in, it is a phenomenal machine (I have the air); great keyboard, touchpad and screen, great battery life and it stays cool throughout a development day.
If you need x86/64 binaries, then these laptops are not a good choice; wait until there are m1 arm targets.
1: https://www.phonearena.com/news/app-store-users-spend-more-t...
2: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/iphone-user...