For Apple it was do or die the first few times. Until x86, if they didn’t move they’d just be left in the dust and their market would disappear.

The ARM transition wasn’t strictly necessary like the last ones. It had huge benefits for them, so it makes sense, but they also knew what they were doing by then.

In your examples (which are great) Intel wasn’t going to die. They had backups, and many of those seem guided more by business goals than a do-or-die situation.

I wonder if that’s part of why they failed.

In a way that's also true for the x86->ARM transition, isn't it? I had an MacbookAir 2018. And.. "it was crap" is putting it very, very mildly. Yes it was still better than any Windows laptop I got since and much less of a hassle than any Linux laptop that I'm aware of in my circle. But the gap was really, really small and it cost twice as much.

But the most important part for the working of the transition is probably that, in any of theses cases, the typical final user didn't even notice. Yes a lot of Hackernews-like people noticed as they had to recompile some of their programs. But most people :tm: didn't. They either use AppStore apps, which were fixed ~immediately or Rosetta made everything runnable, even if performance suffered.

But that's pretty much the requirement you have: You need to be handle to transition ~all users to the new platform with ~no user work and even without most vendors doing anything. Intel never could provide that, not even aim for it. So they basically have to either a) rip their market in pieces or b) support the "deprecated" ISA forever.

> Rosetta made everything runnable, even if performance suffered.

I think a very important part was that even with the Rosetta overhead, most x86 programs were faster on the m1 than on the machines which it would have been replacing. It wasn’t just that you could continue using your existing software with a perf hit; your new laptop actually felt like a meaningful upgrade even before any of your third party software got updated.

I don’t think so. I’ve got a 2019 MBP and yeah, the heat issue is a big problem.

But they weren’t going to be left in the performance dust like the last times. Their chip supplier wasn’t going to stop selling chips to them.

They would have likely had to give up on how thin their laptops were, but they could have continued on just fine.

I do think the ARM transition wasn’t strictly good, it let them stay thin and quiet and cooler. They got economies of scale with their phone chips.

But it wasn’t necessary to the degree the previous ones were.

> I do think the ARM transition wasn’t strictly good

That’s a total typo I didn’t catch in time. I’m not sure what I tried to type, but I thought the transition was good. They didn’t have to but I’m glad they did.

IBM also did it, with mainframes. But otherwise, no.

In a sense, Freescale/NXP did it from their old PowerPC to ARM.