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?
There are already Linux distros targeting ARM and linux ARM based laptops for sale. If Microsoft drops the ball then it will give laptop manufacturers with limited linux support, such as hp and lenovo, the impetus to fully embrace it in order to compete with Apple. Microsoft is already more committed to Azure than windows so it's not completely impossible they give up but we can only hope.
actually, my main laptop is an arm based pinebook. While I do love it and it has some definitive upsides like its battery life, it is by no means performant. I also use a couple raspberry pis. I would really love to see a high powered arm laptop targeting linux, and apples push in this direction probably increases the likelyhood that that will happen. But dont expect that at least for the next 5 years or so. Pine are really the only option right now and they have no new upgraded laptop in the pipeline