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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by tathougies on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:13PM (#16738145)
Apple has more experience with architecture changes than many other companies. In general, transitioning to a new processor architecture is very straightforward, and way easier than switching to a new OS.

The reason why windows on ARM never caught on was simply that windows was still available for x86. With apple it's different though, because once (Or if) they switch, then the only way to be on OS X is through the use of the new architecture.

There are a variety of features of OS X that are going to keep the design community there for the foreseeable future.

Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by mynameisvlad on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:26PM (#16738284)
Well, except it's not that simple at all. Even if they immediately discontinue all previous models and only introduce new architecture models in one go, you still have several years worth of computers sitting on x86/x64. They won't be able to get rid of it in the OS until at least the mid-2020s.

As an example with the PPC->x86 move, they released Rosetta in 2005, stopped pre-installing it in 2009, and only in 2011 did then completely remove the ability to install it. I foresee a similar experience here.

Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by tathougies on Monday April 02, 2018 @07:56PM (#16740591)
The technology to do this is already there. Apple will likely extend some piece of open-source work or acquire a small company which specializes in emulating x86 on whatever architecture they transition to. Emulators are complicated pieces of software, but they are well understood ones. We know how to make them reasonably performant, and Apple has had around four major architecture changes under its belt from which it can draw experience.

The existence of Rosetta does not prove the transition to be 'complicated'. It just shows the transition was a thing