[eeiac928]

Ford or GM sell vehicles with engines taylored to customer needs. Given the volumes of chips Apple ships to the end customer, why can't they offer 6 kinds of chip architecture like the choice in colored metal finish? Why does it have to be one chip's ISA one generation at a time?

[erwan577]

In your colored car analogy all cars use the same fuel. An Apple computer with a different chip arch will use different software. Yes fat binary are a thing but anyway all different archs should be tested separately. This is a real bummer especially for small dev shops.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I would expect emulation to be perfectly sufficient for testing purposes?

[api]

The big down-side is that they'd end up with really fat binaries and edge case bugs in some apps across architectures.

Apple can pivot architectures, but I don't think they do it lightly.

[brucehoult]

Modern MacOS and iOS app size is completely dominated by image and other media assets. The code is down in the noise.

[saagarjha]

This is not true; most popular iOS apps have very large binary sizes.