Even moreso their hardware buyers.

If most Intel hardware makers had gone full ARM, they would simply have lost market share. Apple customers are going to buy Apple hardware—whatever it has inside.

But of course Apple controls not just the hardware but the OS. So ya, if only Apple hardware will run your application, you are going to port to that hardware.

Apple has a massive advantage in these transitions for sure.

> apple basically had the power to frog march it's app devs to a new cpu arch

Microsoft's ARM transition execution has been poor.

Apple's Rosetta worked on day one.

Microsoft's Prism still has some issues, but at release its compatibility with legacy x86 software was abysmal.

Apple's first party apps and developer IDE had ARM versions ready to go on day one.

Not so for Microsoft.

Apple released early Dev Kit hardware before the retail hardware was ready to go (at very low cost).

Microsoft did not.

Microsoft already had an example of how to do this in a reasonable fashion. Not only that, but the original developer was an ARM licensee. And then finally, during that era Windows was still being developed for multiple architectures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

That's a good example of a non-Apple processor transition where DEC's Alpha CPU performance was industry leading, and the compatibility layer for legacy software was solid.