Now im no apple shill. So much so that I quietly laugh on the inside whenever I see someone flexing their overpriced, overdesigned, overmarketed apple bs. But..... From what we can tell from early reviewers, the new M1 based apple hardware blows every conventional pc out of the water, especially when it comes to power per watt. Even non-native apps seem to run about as fast through rosetta as they did on last gen macs, which is insane if you ever ran x86 code on ARM or vice versa. And they are only getting better with new hardware iterations and the arrival of more arm native software. At the same time they are locked down as fuck; i don't expect we'll see someone being able to run linux on them anytime soon.
In all honesty - and it brings me no joy to say this - i think apple just won the personal computing game. Especially if they start releasing some lower priced hardware next year. I don't see MS keeping up, and expect them to be limited to office environments. What's your 2 cents? will we see another ARM windows push? Will windows just give up? how will this change computing in the long run?
MS hasn't 'kept up' for years and it's not important that they do so. Windows' installed base means it's going to be around forever. Just look at how long Solaris held on. And that had what, like five customers by the end?? Snow Leopard was probably the best commercial operating system ever made. Lion OTOH was basically the devil, because it incorporated a bunch of new hardware chips to make sure the software ON THE HARDWARE YOU PURCHASED isn't anything Apple wouldn't like. People made all kinds of wild predictions about Apple moving to Intel 10+ years ago, but not much changed : Apple was and will continue to be a great choice for people willing to overpay for artificially limited options.