Their compatibility layers being intended as exclusively transitional can be frustrating, but on the other hand it’s also why near every Mac app now has a proper aarch64 build. If it were known that Rosetta were going to remain part of the OS forever, many apps would’ve never been ported and would’ve been at an effectively permanent 30-60% performance penalty and disproportionate drags on battery life.
On the other side of the fence in Windows land, adoption of features much more trivial than an architecture change are absolutely glacial because devs know they can lean on back compatibility in perpetuity.
Apple’s approach is perhaps too aggressive but Microsoft’s is far too lax. I don’t think it’s realistic to dump a binary and expect it to work forever with no maintenance.
Even if Windows wanted to push hard to get off x86 they still lack ARM hardware worth moving to in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if the 13" M1 MacBook alone shipped more units than all Windows 8/8.1/10/11 ARM devices combined. The 32 bit -> 64 bit app migration for x86 was also much slower on Windows but, again, there wasn't any real performance gain to be had until your app needed more than 4 GB of RAM in a single process, so no real pressure there either.
The moment Windows actually has non-x86 hardware which people actually want to buy I bet native app support comes pretty quick.
> The moment Windows actually has non-x86 hardware which people actually want to buy I bet native app support comes pretty quick.
Snapdragon X laptops are here already, and reviews are generally positive (of course, use and workload dependent, nobody should get one to game, but for web browsing and long battery life it's perfect).
Qualcomm's exclusivity deal with Microsoft started 9 years ago, but if you've got the numbers to say people are actually buying the latest Snapdragon option more often for web browsing than x86 laptops I'd be willing to believe something has finally changed. Otherwise there is always some special stat advertised about how "this time it really is better", yet it's never what people actually want.
Looking at the M1, there was no "if", "but", "for certain", etc wording. It was just better all around, even comparing gaming performance vs older MacBooks. Even running Windows ARM in a VM was better than buying a Windows laptop (x86 or ARM) in terms of both performance and battery. Based on your description, I don't think the Snapdragon X laptops are the same story?
On the other side of the fence in Windows land, adoption of features much more trivial than an architecture change are absolutely glacial because devs know they can lean on back compatibility in perpetuity.
Apple’s approach is perhaps too aggressive but Microsoft’s is far too lax. I don’t think it’s realistic to dump a binary and expect it to work forever with no maintenance.