Daniel B (fejenagy.delete@this.gmail.com) on June 25, 2020 7:36 am wrote:
>
> I think a bigger point is that it's difficult to see what customers gain, ordinary or professional.
> Apple, if forces the issue, makes its ecosystem and customers go through a considerable disruption
> in exchange for nothing tangible other than higher in-house BOM content and even stronger gross margins
> for itself. It is difficult to see how exactly will performance or any 'user experience' be superior
> just because it's not a merchant but a captive design. Theoretical marketing arguments are easy to
> make. On the other hand of course, Apple customers are not exactly the paragon of self-interested
> agents, god bless their hearts. The previous ISA transition was, at least, beneficial to customers,
> largely because Apple waited so long a considerable performance gap opened up.

Both of the previous transitions were forced by Apple's CPU supplier(s): Motorola and IBM simply no longer had any plans to keep developing the kind of CPUs you'd want in a desktop or laptop.

And every interested party in the Apple ecosystem understood that: Apple, the 3rd party software developers and the users.