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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Or, Apple might manufacture both Intel and ARM based macs. You want virtualization? Or maybe x86-based games, Audio Units and other binaries that are slow to catch up? Here is your Intel iMac. You don't care? Fine, get a cheaper ARM Mac/MBP with a longer battery life. And more compact too. This could go on for some 5-10 years until Apple's ARM gets better at everything and all the relevant apps get recompiled.

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This was exactly what Microsoft tried to do with the Surface Pro and Surface RT. The Surface RT hardware was very well made, however it only ran Metro-style Windows apps, so the only piece of big-name software for it ended up being Office.

Apple does have the scale on its app store to force developers to change over to ARM (say, if they announce ARM computers a year before they are for sale), but at the PPC -> x86 switch, Intel processors were more powerful than equivalent PowerPCs, allowing Rosetta to bridge the gap. This is more difficult (but not impossible) with ARM processors.

Also, if all of the computers are ARM, you lose out on virtualization, which is a biggie for many business users.

Microsoft totally screwed that up. They should simply have added another arch, full stop. Like they did for MIPS and Alpha in the past. The Office example is great, since they didn't follow their own rules-it was a desktop app.

Just another part of their mishandling of things for no good reason.

That would be an absolute nightmare for app developers...I think Apple will most likely convert the whole Mac line over to ARM in a single release while maintaining some kind of translation or virtualization layer for apps that need to run on the "old architecture". They did it before with Rosetta: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_%28software%29

Maybe if all the apps were coming from the Mac App Store. I think the limits of Sandboxing have slowed that progress significantly. They should have reasonable allowances to bypass the sandbox for apps that really do need the entire machine. Instead we are now so restrictive a text editor isn't feasible and the Mac App Store is faltering.

http://www.panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/

PS-I don't think they will switch to ARM. The new USB-C MacBook is very power efficient.

Universal binaries, or otherwise VM-based approach with JIT. I think Swift is moving in that direction. Just imagine you have pure Swift with no ObjC or C code allowed: the compiler will be able to easily build a VM binary that will be JIT'ed on the machine.

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