[cardanome]

Apple products are only dominant the US. For the rest of the world they are more of an luxury item.

That said, I am not terribly interested in ARM-based laptops for now. Yes, they may be more energy efficient and all but that hardly matters to me compared to just having the same x86 architecture I run on my desktop and servers. That sweet binary-compatibility means less headache.

People underestimate the advantages that CPU architecture monoculture gave us, though they are getting admittingly less important year by year. Maybe one day I am going to run an ARM laptop or even RISC-V.

[mpweiher]

> ... just having the same x86 architecture I run on my desktop and servers.

Yep! For me, it's the same ARM64 architecture I run on my desktop and servers[1]. :-)

Hetzner's offering is very competitive, cheaper than their already rock-bottom x86 offerings. Then there's AWS Graviton, Oracle with their free tier (not sure how expensive that gets if you actually have to load it) and both Azure and Google also have ARM offerings.

[1] https://blog.metaobject.com/2023/05/setting-up-hetzner-arm-i...

[pjmlp]

> People underestimate the advantages that CPU architecture monoculture gave us, though they are getting admittingly less important year by year.

People also oversell it, I never had any problem developing software for Windows 2000/NT, Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Symbian, from my x86 desktop.

[agloe_dreams]

A key element to Apple and ARM and why you are right outside the us is this:

1. Apple's chips are so far beyond everything else that it makes obvious sense for Apple only. Snapdragon is at least 30% slower single core while having worse Performance per watt.

2. Apple wasn't playing fair with their translation layer. The Rosetta layer cheats a little because apple also made the chip. The secret sauce is that the M1 has a hardware compatibility mode (That technically breaks ARM spec) for x86 memory order that basically gives near 1:1 performance.

3. Microsoft heavily botched their ARM rollout (again. Hello, Windows RT). The translation layer on W10/11 is just bad, not because of bad coding but just the technical limits of what they were trying to do.

4. Google is in a great place with ARM compatibility in Chrome OS as the only consumer-facing apps are either built-in or on the play store...which was designed for ARM in the first place. Problem is that nobody will give them a good chip for ChromeOS and the focus is on low end, so Mediatek is just cruising.

ARM is a great arch...but right now it is Apple VS x86, not ARM.

[astrange]

> That technically breaks ARM spec

It does not (or it wouldn't be there) and they aren't the only ARM vendor with TSO (Fujitsu also does it.)

[monocasa]

Optionally enabling it does break the ARM spec.

Their cores break the ARM spec in other ways too. Added instructions for AMX, new guard privilege modes, HCR_EL2.E2H can't be disabled, GPRs are clobbered on WFI, etc.

[yyyk]

>3. Microsoft heavily botched their ARM rollout (again. Hello, Windows RT). The translation layer on W10/11 is just bad, not because of bad coding but just the technical limits of what they were trying to do.

It's not bad at all, however Intel patents heavily restricted the initial implementation, to the point they couldn't ship the 64bit emulation. Apple decided to wait out the patents.

[ngcc_hk]

Unfair … strange use of phrase. Innovative would be a better use of word as nothing prepare others to do the same … it is good to have a vendor play differently not follow the slow and dominated by arm player c.

The conclusion is on the ball but only current. M1 has been a bit old now and if other arm vendor and the two major architecture (ibm power for mainframe … cannot be counted) it is at least x86-32 plus x86-64 vs arm vs apple.

[agloe_dreams]

The wording of unfair is more of a fun use of the word. Because Apple vertically integrated the whole product and software supply chain, they are singularly able to do things others cannot. In that context, if one is playing "fair" on the terms of everyone else when they could do more...they are losing.