ARM is an approach to computing. Many of the applications were low power consumption CPUs. Apple has been illustrating quite clearly that their CPUs for *PHONES* were knocking on the performance door of Intel’s mid to high end systems. Now they can make higher power consumption versions of those CPUs that perform even better. From a performance perspective, Apple is just taking it to the next step by not waiting on Qualcomm and others to innovate higher performance CPUs and it’s paying off in spades for them.

The developer dilemma isn’t really Windows. The average developer can virtualize a windows environment pretty damned easily locally or in a cloud environment. Rosetta2 has shown that all your tools can come along for the ride and 'just work’s. It’s really developers that are building for x86 SPECIFICALLY that are impacted. Primarily game players and developers are burned badly in the transition. Unity and Unreal devs where the environment migration will be PAINFUL in new and exciting ways. Pro users who have codecs, plugins and workflows heavily dependent on x86 will suffer as well. But the average dev, especially a mobile dev, will hardly have issues as their environment was largely simulated to begin with.

If you said you were a Unity dev I’d say “yeah, life is about to suck -hard” but most other devs that aren’t writing specific to x86 instructions will at best feel a speed bump.