tjwolf

“...largely erasing last week’s tumble” - your own numbers indicate that it gained back 9% of a 16% loss - I wouldn’t call just over half “largely”. 

cropr said:

Using the Mac for cloud development, this could become an issue for me.  All major cloud providers are using an Intel architecture. 

If Apple would move the whole Mac product line away from Intel there is absolutely no reason to keep a Mac as a development machine.   A Dell XPS with Ubuntu will not only have the price advantage (the current situation), but also the ease of use and speed advantage.

My use case is of course only limited to a few percent of the market, but it could anyhow jeopardize the market share of Macs

I don't get this argument: just because you're developing (code/debug/run rinse, repeat) on an ARM based Mac doesn't mean you're deploying to an ARM based cloud.  I haven't personally deployed anything to the cloud, but my company does.  We develop our applications on our desktops/laptops, then there's a separate build process that puts our app(s) into a container(s) (which is x86/Linux) and those get deployed into a public cloud or into a customer's private cloud.

The author gives Apple's previous two CPU transitions as an indicator for a successful ARM transition.  But he's kind of ignoring the fact that in those two prior transitions, the CPU being moved to was significantly faster than the CPU being migrated from.  This then allowed the use of emulation software ("Rosetta") to let users continue using "legacy" software without too much of a performance penalty.    ARM is not significantly faster than Intel chips, so how will Apple handle this transitional period in which users need/want to continue using legacy software?

With respect to software getting transitioned to ARM, the author picks only the low-hanging fruit: sure, for software actively for sale, its developers have an economic incentive to move it to ARM, but what about truly legacy stuff or even open-source applications with little community support?  Developers are a big group, enthusiastic Mac user group.  We use all sorts of open source software - be it IDEs, web servers, compilers, Java VMs, virtualization software, etc.  Can you imagine how slow an emulated VirtualBox would be trying to, itself, emulate an x86 version of Windows?

"This works out to roughly one quarter to one-third of the credit card issuer's revenue from the transaction" - is this actually true?  If so, it's a lot different from the US.  In the US, the issuing bank gets approximately 1.75% of  about a 2% fee the merchant pays for accepting the credit card (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee).  So 0.15% is nowhere near a quarter to one-third of the revenue from the transaction - more like 8.5%-14%.

I don't know what the preoccupation with a folding display is about - like a desperate attempt to find a use case for bendable displays.  As another poster suggested - and I can't figure out why nobody's done it yet - a far easier and much less fragile solution would be to simply have two displays with near-zero bezels come together on a simple hinge.  Sure, you'll have a thin black line separating the two halves of the "big" display, but that is hardly any worse than having to read text on a creased foldable display.