[philwelch]

What’s the server adoption of ARM?

Apple switched to x86 in the first place because it had become a standard. Adopting a common standard is always going to have advantages. The advantages of supporting or adopting ARM has to outweigh those advantages to be worthwhile. This is true not just for Apple but for the server market as well.

For Apple, there are two clear advantages: power efficiency (which is the same thing as heat) and vertical integration. AWS can enjoy the same advantages from ARM. But these are both essentially hardware providers. AWS still offers x86-based EC2 instances and while they might encourage users to migrate to ARM (by perhaps passing on their own savings), there’s a lot of inertia there. Apple is a company that bites the bullet and forces these migrations, but how many developers will support or migrate to ARM just because that’s what’s running their MacBook?

[corndoge]

My comment wasn't really related to macs; imo if you ship binaries you should aim to provide builds for, say, the top 3 arches, and this is especially relevant for Docker images since the de facto standard for deploying them is just to pull them from dockerhub. Docker also fails in this regard since even though it knows the arch (it says it on dockerhub) docker client will still happily pull an amd64 image on ARM with no warning whatsoever

[philwelch]

Right, what I’m saying is that until there’s a lot of movement in the server space away from amd64, I can completely understand why multiarch support isn’t a priority. It’s less of a fundamental principle and more of a tradeoff.