I am really not an expert on this at all. My impression is that the Apple silicon chips are stupid fast in ways that Intel can't even touch. I don't know if that has anything to do with the RISCness, and I don't know if there are downsides, and and and. There's been this atmosphere that RISC Is The Better Future for literally longer than I've been alive and for all I know it's true. I don't care if we stay on x86, it makes no difference to me, but ideally whenever we do switch, the last 40 years of computer software efforts will not go down the drain in the process.

Microsoft's last attempt at ARM failed that test completely, and Apple has a complicated relationship with backwards compatibility. But a future where, you know, Microsoft releases WARMdows 13 and it has a really good x86 JIT recompiler or whatever could be good. I can believe in that happening and I'd be happy as a clam to use it. And honestly, if the perf is good enough and the power consumption is lower and all that, then I could swallow a Great Compatibility Break. There will always be VMs, and i7 7th gens will work for decades.

The thing I worry about is that nobody has even tried to make "a PC, but it's ARM." that hasn't happened, and it won't. nobody's going to take an incremental step over the line, they'll make a completely new platform that throws out absolutely everything and behaves like a Device. you won't install an OS, you'll flash your firmware. and it will always be TPMed up the asshole, I won't be able to boot a copy of Haiku that I just compiled from source because it won't be digitally signed by one of three trusted corporations. that's a thing with PCs already, but you can turn it off. any ARM platform they release will not make it optional; they will not resist the urge to add all the stuff they wish they could add to either protect me from myself or protect Bank of America from botnets made up of senior citizens.

Apple's vision of a desktop PC is an iPad, and Microsoft's attempts at a desktop ARM PC were bad iPads, and that's the only thing anyone's going to field, things that act like Appliances. if you want an iPad, i think you should just buy an iPad. They sell them, for money. People live their whole lives on them, It's Not That Bad, I'm Told, if you're someone who is okay with never doing anything that's Not Advisable. I use a PC for the same reason I use an Android phone: because there are benefits to living without reactor core containment, and after making it 35 years without turning into a rad mutant, I am not interested in suddenly being Safe At All Costs.

if they decide to make an ARM CPU that can be put into a shitty Asus motherboard, that you can pair with mismatched RAM, that you can overclock for no good reason other than to get marginally better perf with significantly decreased lifespan, one where the OS vendor can't just deliver an update as a binary blob because my memory and storage config is completely unpredictable, you know, one that sucks, I will switch to it with no complaints.

i was going to write this in a comment but it got too long

frankly the only reason the PC is the way it is is because it grew organically out of IBM's product, by way of a grey-bordering-on-black market that really should have been illegal. like, yeah, obviously IBM should not have been able to keep the IP rights to the platform, it's better for society this way, but that's not how things usually go. by every extant rule of our capitalist hellhole world, compaq should have been buried for cloning the BIOS. we all know they skated, and by all rights IBM should have crushed them just like they crushed the other companies who did the same thing at the same time.

the PC ecosystem is eternally cheap and shitty, even at it's best, because clones started life as counterfeits; cheap alternatives to the real thing. you can't take that out of its DNA. theft and cost cutting are in the PC's bones, and it's why we love them: because they're bad, the way counterfeits are bad.

buying a fucking 128-core 64-bit supercomputer chip and then anchoring it to a motherboard that prints 80x25 text on startup and spits out error messages that were first written in the 80s, because it simply doesn't matter if the product looks professional, because everyone is used to it looking like shit, is the actual cyberpunk future, we are living it. all PCs are cyberdecks, they're grey-market imports, so of course the firmware is all weird and glitchy, of course it lets you do things you aren't supposed to do, things that aren't advisable, because it's barely holding together. it wasn't designed, it grew.

no corporation would ever have designed a platform like this, and to wit, IBM didn't! the PC was supposed to be configured by a value added reseller, and it was hoped you would go back to your dealer for maintenance. It spit out cryptic error codes instead of useful messages - and maybe that could have been for lack of ROM space, but when the PS/2 came out six years later they did it again. total dependence is what they wanted; control of the user experience is what they wanted; and why wouldn't they? who would sell something this asinine? a platform where absolutely nothing is predictable, nothing is stable - this is business poison. hell, it's just a bad idea.

this all happened by accident, through a confluence of various levels of scumbags separately deciding to rip off IBM's product and somehow succeeding, and it's able to keep going by sheer momentum, but it could only possibly have started 40 years ago, when home computers were considered toys and nobody was really quite paying attention to them. it can't happen again.

the creation of the clone market is a phenomenon that can never, ever be repeated. partly because in the intervening time IP law has become more powerful than the word of God, partly because it's impossible to make a new platform without investing a solid billion dollars, which no scrappy startup will ever be able to do, but also because 40 years ago you could make some awful knockoff device and put halfass code on it and it didn't matter. now, if you build something from scratch and you don't put draconic, paranoiac security into it, you're just a dumbass; that device is going to get popped instantly and become a Vector.

my PC should be locked down under a billion layers of TLS and digital signing. it would be the smart thing. i would be safer that way. but well, I should make regular backups too. i'm on year 30 of being frogboiled and the water still feels fine, so I see no reason to jump out of a great big pot into a claustrophobically tiny pond, no matter how sensible it is.