Thanks for the feedback Anton! There are obviously particular kinds of industries x86 compatibility will continue to matter for a long time for the reasons you mention.

However we should not overstate the problem either. Apple e.g. runs x86 binaries in emulation without much performance hit. They simply translate the x86 code to ARM code before running. I think the performance hit is something like 20-30%.

And ARM has been around for quite some time now, so people are used to writing software that runs on all platforms. Often recompiling for ARM is just to toggle a switch in the compiler.

For Apple's part they have pushed platform independence since they transitionsed from Motorola 68k later PowerPC to Intel.

Linux has long been focused on having the source code for all software they use. Whole distrubutions can be recompiled for another platform. Thus it is not suprising that there has been ARM based Linux for a long time now.

So software will run in emulation/translation or simply recompiled. I am sure there will be some hiccups, but for most people using e.g. an M1 Mac today, stuff just works. It doesn't matter to most people that it actually has an ARM chip inside.

Just like it didn't take long before we didn't have to care if our computer had a PowerPC or Intel chip inside.

On the PC of course an ARM transition might be much harder. The PC industry has never made a major hardware transition. For Apple this is old hat, they have been on 5 different hardware platforms now: 6502, 68k, PowerPC, Intel and now ARM. They have had three different OS platforms: Apple DOS, macOS and then macOS X.