I reckon this move will drive an arrow straight through the entire desktop market.
Why would I say that? Because the assumption desktop developers have made for decades is that Wintel/Lintel is the norm, everything else is a side dish. And Macs since their Intel shift have conformed to this, if not in terms of API, then certainly in the core architecture decisions. And that means that you design the software "for x86". If you try to run Linux software on a Chromebook you'll often have a nasty experience with these assumptions making things break. And nobody is paying much attention to Win10 on ARM chips.
But now you have a top-down mandate from Apple, which is in a strong position to direct the desktop platform again, possibly the strongest it's ever had. Everyone who follows Apple knows that they tend to obsolete things quickly; they have played this game before. The move they've made is to usher all the developers, not just the mobile ones, to ARM. And that means throwing out a substantial part of old codebases optimized for many generations of Intel chips. It pressures the Linux junkies to be more cross-platform, which in turn topples over some assumptions around Linux desktops themselves. The major distributions will scramble to support Apple hardware.
And a consequence of the assumptions in Linux changing is that you can start doing some ground-up rethinking too. "We're redoing this part of the codebase, let's change the design." And with Apple support may also come Surface support, Chromebook support - giving all the ARM platforms equal treatment. So it's likely that multiple operating systems will see a generational shift, not just Apple's. A big chain of events that will explode some projects and leave others untouched.
And then at the end of that, we might have RISC-V hardware coming over the horizon.
Why would I say that? Because the assumption desktop developers have made for decades is that Wintel/Lintel is the norm, everything else is a side dish. And Macs since their Intel shift have conformed to this, if not in terms of API, then certainly in the core architecture decisions. And that means that you design the software "for x86". If you try to run Linux software on a Chromebook you'll often have a nasty experience with these assumptions making things break. And nobody is paying much attention to Win10 on ARM chips.
But now you have a top-down mandate from Apple, which is in a strong position to direct the desktop platform again, possibly the strongest it's ever had. Everyone who follows Apple knows that they tend to obsolete things quickly; they have played this game before. The move they've made is to usher all the developers, not just the mobile ones, to ARM. And that means throwing out a substantial part of old codebases optimized for many generations of Intel chips. It pressures the Linux junkies to be more cross-platform, which in turn topples over some assumptions around Linux desktops themselves. The major distributions will scramble to support Apple hardware.
And a consequence of the assumptions in Linux changing is that you can start doing some ground-up rethinking too. "We're redoing this part of the codebase, let's change the design." And with Apple support may also come Surface support, Chromebook support - giving all the ARM platforms equal treatment. So it's likely that multiple operating systems will see a generational shift, not just Apple's. A big chain of events that will explode some projects and leave others untouched.
And then at the end of that, we might have RISC-V hardware coming over the horizon.