Apple's Shifting Differentiation

Software is the key for me. I am by no means a power user but I really am loathe to give up even more of my software library to swap to Apple Silicon after Catalina cratered my gaming library in Steam and some older apps from companies long gone.

I don't expect I am alone in this observation but the number of software companies they highlighted during the M1 debut was very slim and to be honest I have not heard of half of them until then and don't remember them now.

So to me it matters not how much faster AS is, what matters is if I can run want I want to run. I am not going to own two separate machines to do what I want to do. If AS machines cannot do all I need I will keep my current Mac till support runs out and look again

Rosetta 2 allows you to run your x86 mac apps on Apple silicon. It's like the PPC->Intel switch again; your software keeps working regardless of the hardware underneath.

To add to parent’s point, AS is a one way trip to Big Sur, with no viable alternative (no downgrade, no dual boot anymore)

Then it’s not just big app companies that need to adapt, homebrew and CLI short lived utilities will also need ARM compatible versions or we’ll be wrapping each individual command in a Rosetta 2 launcher.

It might not be that bad, but I’d sure want to wait and see how it pans out, as it doesn’t look like a trivial transition.

Doesn't homebrew compile in place anyway? Macports does if they don't have a binary package handy. And as for arm compatibility, most command line tools come from Linux where they've already been compiled for arm ages ago.

So the CLI should be the least problem with Big Sur. Unless they somehow cripple it on purpose so you can't use common unix command line stuff any more.