> "no more x86" and devs either have to jump on board or abandon Apple.
I don't think that's fair. They provided a very smooth transition, with a well performing translation layer. The user wouldn't have to care or even notice when they picked up a new ARM MacBook, except their battery lasted way longer and cooler. Everything that worked still worked (well, 64bit at least). I'm still running x86-64 apps, and developing for x86-64, on my ARM MacBook.
When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well. They nuked the customer perception on day 1. When they finally implemented the x86 compatibility, it had terrible performance and compatibility.
Now, Apple's 32-bit to 64-bit transition was definitely a "jump on board or abandon Apple", but the Intel to Arm transition was well crafted, from a user perspective.
> When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well.
It was worse than this. Source compatibility with the Win32 APIs you would use for ~20 years to target x86/amd64 was explicitly a non goal. To target ARM you needed to use their new, half-baked frameworks designed for the Windows 8 tablets. You couldn't recompile a desktop app, even if it would have worked fine had they given you the headers and libs to do it.
Even internally, even among decision makers, people were very confused about this.
They also wanted to force people to get everything from Windows Store. This deeply spooked Valve at the time who saw this as potentially the end of Steam, and it's a big part of the reason why they started working on making Linux gaming viable. So overall RT was an incredible failure and Microsoft is still feeling its effects today
They believed the ARM transition would be an excellent opportunity to lose support for the old. Remember the Barney Stinson model: New is always better
This transition would not help much if Apple was just one of dozens of macos laptops.
Microsoft can't afford to discontinue support for x86 even over 10 years. They have enough trouble keeping Windows compatible with legacy software that the world runs on through generations of x86 hardware and software, transition to arm would be many times as bad.
The modern Qualcomm Windows laptops also come with binary translation that's fast enough that you can use most amd64 programs just fine. Qualcomm had some GPU driver issues, but other than that things like gaming on aarch64 work just fine (and I imagine most video games put more varied strain on the GPU than Blender).
Windows RT is dead and buried. Blender won't run on it either, because RT never got to Windows 11.
I don't think that's fair. They provided a very smooth transition, with a well performing translation layer. The user wouldn't have to care or even notice when they picked up a new ARM MacBook, except their battery lasted way longer and cooler. Everything that worked still worked (well, 64bit at least). I'm still running x86-64 apps, and developing for x86-64, on my ARM MacBook.
When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well. They nuked the customer perception on day 1. When they finally implemented the x86 compatibility, it had terrible performance and compatibility.
Now, Apple's 32-bit to 64-bit transition was definitely a "jump on board or abandon Apple", but the Intel to Arm transition was well crafted, from a user perspective.