Looks like a) he's not extrapolating anything, and b) the AC knew those huuuuge barriers existed when he wrote his post.
I suspect this isn't being held in case the Mac market falls apart, but in case the iPad market starts losing to Surface and friends.
Non-strategic value though is probably just as important as any of this stuff: as probably most of HN knows well, keeping a codebase portable can be quite helpful in terms of plain and simple quality. Obscure bugs or bad patterns that are hard to find on one architecture can be a lot easier to identify on another. It can help promote discipline and good practices. Portability I think is really a constant process rather then a goal or single thing, it's a lot easier to have worked on it all along for years before you need it then try to "port" something later because without the constant pressure of staying portable it's all too easy to start falling into dependence on features (or worse, quirks) of a single arch and build up more and more technical debt. Then when the "bill" (not necessarily just in terms of money but sheer developer hours) finally comes due it's effectively unpayable.
Right. Even if they had no intent of making ARM laptops (although I suspect they probably do have that intent), the exercise of keeping the code portable between Intel and ARM would serve them in good stead even if they later went to yet a third CPU architecture.
This is just my speculation. But, 1) You learn things; 2) You lessen lock-in / dependence, in turn reducing the markup you have to pay on existing production inputs.
Apple's benefited very considerably from the increasing customization and optimization of its phone CPU et al. platform. What's the argument against carrying that over to their computer lines, if and when they can make that a relatively smooth transition?
(That said, even on this account they had laptops running Intel for several years before the transition was decided upon).
I forget the exact magic method, and don't know if it is still in shipping versions of OS X, but I would be surprised if at least internal-to-Apple versions of their compiler and toolchain didn't still have this available for use.
Give me a foldable iPad that still has screen in both halves, but that is usable in landscape, and I will buy.
Appropriate haptics could make it work like a tiny laptop in portrait, but like a regular all-screen iPad in landscape.
Although if the software is through the Mac App Store only, then... well, it won't be a very useful device. I hope that they're looking to replace the Macbook with an ARM device, not create a new Chromebook.
As I think about it -- wouldn't app store (if well run, then it provides the best possible security for distribution of binaries without source code and the most consumer friendly commercial licensing model) + open source eco-system (self-compiled -- source only distribution) pretty much the best possible world for users? There is (kind of) an open-source argument for making binary distribution without source onerous or impossible...
Perhaps they'll bundle or distribute an official version of something like homebrew to make installing open-source software as easy as possible and maybe even provide a way for binaries generated from these packages to become signed and distributed as binaries as an optimization?
I don't think I would mind app-store being the only way to get pre-compiled binaries if augmented with a well-supported open-source ecosystem for utilities that need to venture beyond the capabilities of the app-store sandbox. There is a technical argument for making any software that needs to operate beyond the sandbox subject to source code auditing simply because of the potential attack surface ... I wouldn't necessarily mind if subscription pricing was the only business model for such sandbox-spanning utilities -- continuance maintenance (and ongoing revenue) for software that works beyond the sandbox is needed from a security perspective ...
One of our devs just got a new XPS 15. It's a gorgeous machine. Amazing. First time I've envied a non-Apple machine since the early 2000s. I still marginally prefer the Mac track pad but the rest is on par or better.
It made things easier for developers because they only had to ship one set of installation media regardless of the CPU the user had.
