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Apple is the only company that has managed a single CPU transition successfully. That they actually did it three times is incredible.

I think people are blind to the amount of pre-emptive work a transition like that requires. Sure, Linux and FreeBSD support a bunch of architectures, but are they really all free of bugs due to the architecture? You can't convince me that choosing an esoteric, lightly used arch like Big Endian PowerPC won't come with bugs related to that you'll have to deal with. And then you need to figure out who's responsible for the code, and whether or not they have the hardware to test it on.

It happened to me; small project I put on my ARM-based AWS server, and it was not working even though it was compiled for the architecture.



Apple’s case is really good indeed.

Having a clear software stack that you control plays a key role in this success, right?

Wanting to have the general solution with millions of random off label hardware combinations to support is the challenge.




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