You're comparing a self powered rocket that has to land from 50 miles up at 6,800 mph and has the capability of steering itself on the way down, to a capsule on a parachute zooming back from the moon at 24,000 mph. It's not the same level of difficulty, not even in the same ballpark.

This is true, but to a lesser extent than you're making it out to be. You can always virtualize Windows for ARM64 and run your x86 apps via emulation. There's an obvious performance penalty and MS's x86 emulation isn't great but from my experience it works well enough that unless your workflow is predominantly Windows based its totally worth the tradeoff.

In my use case my primary work computer is a MacBook Pro with M1 max and 64gb of RAM. I'm a director / systems architect, for a smaller sized MSP/Consulting company. 90% of my day to day is on the Mac OS side of the house - research, writing documentation and proposals, and testing various software. I use VScode, Powershell, and manage a large lab via Remote Desktop Manager (which has a AS native Mac version). Just about every piece of software I use is now Apple Silicon native.

When I need something windows I jump into a Parallels Windows VM and get performance which is perceptually indistinguishable from native. Visio is probably the primary piece of x86 software I used and its a prehistoric pig on whatever architecture its running on. My experience with on AS is the same as the 24 core Threadripper machine I used as my daily driver prior to this. I can do the same with Linux VMs when I need them, with even better results as just about everything I need has an ARM64 port.

At the end of the day use case should drive anyone's decision and your point is completely valid. But when it comes to power efficiency and overall hardware the Mac Pro is still generations ahead of anything else out there, and IMO that's worth making minor concessions on how your run your software.

Meant to include this link: http://www.rollcall.com/news/seeing_the_internet_as_a_place_for_freedom_to_flourish-220070-1.html From the post: "I don’t want to critique my colleagues. My degree was in political science, not computer science. So, you have to teach yourself. I spend as much time as possible trying to become a knowledgeable person. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve read a lot of books and I’ve taken some courses on how to do some simple programming. And I actually did some simple programming a long time ago in college. So I’m not an expert, but you need to have at least some concept of how the technology works to avoid making mistakes." --Lofgren