[dougall]

My personal answer: It's good hardware. I like good hardware, so I'm pro-competition. Doing the work makes the hardware documented, for anyone to understand (mainly developers, but also Apple's competitors). Having more developers on ARM also makes ARM more competitive, and helps to break the x86 duopoly on single-core performance.

It's a gift to users and developers, not Apple. I like arm64 a lot more than RISC-V, and find their documentation better. And there aren't yet RISC-V CPUs that have competitive single-core performance.

[simondotau]

And it’s an extra special gift to people who will be buying or inheriting secondhand Apple Silicon hardware in four, five, six years from now. Projects like Asahi Linux will literally divert some obsolete hardware from landfill.

[zer0zzz]

Your work on figuring out the isa is really impressive.

[dougall]

Thanks! It's a tiny contribution compared to Alyssa and Lina's development and reverse engineering work, but it's been very educational and rewarding work so far :)