[sgerenser]

Another big one: not relying on 1 or 2 large companies for CPUs. Intel and especially AMD can’t afford to make (what they perceive to be) niche features on their CPUs. They have to design for the mass market, or if offering something more unusual or specialized they have to sell them at very high prices.

With ARM, any company is able to get an architecture license and go hog wild. The architecture (sticking to AArch64 since nobody cares about 32 bit ARM anymore for general purpose computing) is much cleaner and simpler with less cruft than x86. This makes it easier for a variety of companies to offer different solutions at different price, performance, and power points. Plus with the weight of Apple behind it there will surely be much more development in both the ARM software and hardware space as it applies to general purpose desktop computing.

[oblio]

Yeah, but Apple's stuff won't necessarily translate to generic ARM, they have their own extensions. Plus their own OSes.

I don't really see how this benefits Linux or Windows.

[sgerenser]

They have their own extensions, but having a mainstream desktop platform that runs on ARM will certainly be a push for compilers and software to have better support for ARM in general. For example, right now Docker ARM images are basically an afterthought and if something doesn't work in the ARM version a maintainer might just shrug their shoulders and view ARM as a niche use case. With a critical mass of ARM desktops that will no longer be the case.