A lot of stuff on MacOS ran faster on an M1 with Rosetta 2 than it ran on the Intel chips Apple was selling the year before.
For something not highly performance sensitive like office suite or line of business stuff you’d probably be fine with a half-decent ARM chip.
So much of what we do these days is a web browser (ported) or a secret web browser (Electron/etc). I work in Java, that can be ported if it’s not already. I bet C#/CLR already are.
It’s not perfect. It’s probably not ready for 3D rendering or 4k video editing.
But a HUGE percentage of people could probably go ARM tomorrow if good chips were out there. MS has their own “Rosetta” already for running x86(-64?) on ARM. Is it slow?
From my (very weak) understanding I have the impression the ARM stuff available is really cheap/slow. Not unlike the performance of the first netbooks compared to real laptops. Things that just aren’t powerful enough.
Good for MS for making a dev machine. But a few good general purpose laptops with great battery life would probably move the needle a ton, even if only in the business market.
