With the powerpc to x86 transition Apple was moving towards where everyone else already was. It was one less thing developers had to worry about when supporting Mac. With this migration it's the opposite, and MacOS is still a very small slice of the desktop/laptop market.

I remember Apple's m68k to PowerPC transition. Platform changes were a much bigger deal back then because it determined what kinds of apps you could run, but even so it went without a hitch. We lived with fat binaries for a while but otherwise it wasn't a big deal.

Apple's focus has always been the consumer market, and for most consumers, they're not likely to notice the platform change.

One might say, Apple gained a huge developer demographic when it moved to x64 from PowerPC, won't this matter to them? But most of those developers were creative types that don't work at the binary level anyway. If you're doing front-end web dev on VS Code and almost never fire up gcc/clang, your life isn't going to be impacted significantly.

Those whose lives were impacted (e.g. scientific computing folks who struggled to get certain Linux-specific software to compile on what was a BSD-ish platform) have probably moved off the Apple platform and on to Intel Linux years ago or at least they're likely to be running a Linux VM on their Macbook Pros. (homebrew doesn't really cut it)

Also unlike back in the day when most people were still running desktop apps, so much of what we do on a daily basis is on the browser nowadays. Calendar? Cloud-based. Email? Cloud-based. Word processor/spreadsheet/presentation? Cloud-based -- and Microsoft Office is being ported to ARM. We're living in much more platform-agnostic world than we were even 10 years ago.

I expect the x64 to ARM transition to be seamless to most people who are currently on the macOS platform.

A bunch of Python wheels might need to be recompiled though.

> I expect the x64 to ARM transition to be seamless to most people who are currently on the macOS platform.

I completely agree with you IF Apple contains this to just the Macbook market. If they push this to iMac Pro / Mac Pro, too, though? Or even Macbook Pro? That's a different story. For developers it probably won't matter much, but for users currently relying on things like Protools to make a living? There's a good chance this won't be a friendly transition to them in the short term.

The pro tools (like Pro Tools) are usually the tools that are being ported first. It was the same with all the other transitions.

If not, there will be Universal 2 binaries with both x64/Intel binaries for a while and an emulation mode for legacy binaries. Underoptimized at first? Maybe, but they work well enough and performance catches up eventually -- the transition is over 2 years. Same situation as before. Software that work will continue to work on existing and new hardware for a while. Nothing is going to stop working the moment the new processors come out.

We've seen all this happen before (m68k - PowerPC - Intel). And it's really not a problem.

Did the keynote give any indication that some machines would stay on Intel?

Yes, at the 1:46:10 mark. Tim Cook says they have some Intel based Macs in the pipeline.

It depends on where your perception of "where everyone else already was" in this context.

Is the future more like Intel desktops or more like ARM-based mobile devices? If you think the latter then Apple is definitely moving towards where people will be (insert Gretzky quote: "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.)

I agree, it is a very small part of the market, but I'm not sure I grok your point. I think Apple's has leapfrogged Intel in some ways?

I’m pretty sure their point is that last time, the incentives/burden was more aligned between Apple and soptware producers, because it meant devs had one LESS architecture they had to care about. This time they will have one MORE, and it could very well be an architecture they have no familiarity with. And Apple isn’t exactly known for their technical documentation of new platforms.

I don't know that it's one more platform. I mean, sure, it's not exactly an iPhone, a Pine 64, a Raspberry Pi, or a tablet. It is, however, a very broadly supported processor family. More and more support is coming out for ARM all the time. If you're targeting desktop and anything smaller (phones, tablets, watches, SBCs, smart home devices) then the something smaller if it's bigger than an Arduino is probably ARM.

I think quite a few developers would be happy to use the same basic software stack on on a phone app and a laptop app.

If I'm making a professional desktop app like Blender or whatever, then right now I only need to worry about x86 SIMD optimizations & behaviors. I don't care about iPhone/iPad/Raspberry Pi performance. I may care that it works, because why not? But I don't care about optimizing for it.

Now, though, suddenly I need to figure out how NEON works if I want to continue to support professional users on MacOS. I need to increase my hardware costs to ensure adequate test coverage. I need to use something other than Intel's glorious VTune for profiling & optimization. When I'm step-debugging my C++ or assembly tight-loops, I need to know double the amount of assembly than I do today. I need to learn ARM's memory model & cache behaviors.

If I'm just writing some silly native app that could have been a website as is trendy then yeah this is all no big deal, who cares? But if you're really pushing professional app boundaries, where time is money? That's a different story.

Many things in the world of software are neither webapps nor contain a lot of highly optimized hand-written assembly. That's the worst false dichotomy I've read so far today, and I read political Twitter.

Just because your use case is different from those who have C or C++ code and a good optimizing compiler doesn't mean you need to disparage every other type of developer on the planet.

There are a lot of people who write native ARM for phones and tablets for performance purposes, too. Some of them get down into ARM assembly. If they port to Intel and want to do assembly-level things there, they need to learn twice as much assembly coming the other direction.

ARM is a much bigger platform than x86 nowadays.