>Basically AMD missed the opportunity to be first mover on a market which is now huge with a project Apple proved to be viable three years after the planned AMD release. Any way you look at it, it seems like a major miss.
No man, apple basically had the power to frog march it's app devs to a new cpu arch. That absolutely would not have happened in the windows ecosystem given the amount of legacy apps and (arguably more importantly) games. For proof of this you need look no further than Itanium and windows arm
If most Intel hardware makers had gone full ARM, they would simply have lost market share. Apple customers are going to buy Apple hardware—whatever it has inside.
But of course Apple controls not just the hardware but the OS. So ya, if only Apple hardware will run your application, you are going to port to that hardware.
Apple has a massive advantage in these transitions for sure.
Microsoft already had an example of how to do this in a reasonable fashion. Not only that, but the original developer was an ARM licensee. And then finally, during that era Windows was still being developed for multiple architectures.
That's a good example of a non-Apple processor transition where DEC's Alpha CPU performance was industry leading, and the compatibility layer for legacy software was solid.
No man, apple basically had the power to frog march it's app devs to a new cpu arch. That absolutely would not have happened in the windows ecosystem given the amount of legacy apps and (arguably more importantly) games. For proof of this you need look no further than Itanium and windows arm