Over at Pixel Envy, Nick Heer wrote the perfect sequel to my earlier post about the years of softball coverage of Windows on ARM. Whereas I focused on what people were writing about Windows on ARM, Nick smartly looked at what folks were speculating with ARM-based Macs.

Wellborn’s selection of quotes from enthusiastic press coverage of Microsoft’s lukewarm ARM efforts reminded me to go look for some reactions to the early rumours and the announcement that Apple would be switching to its own processors. I want to do this not just because these things are funny to read in hindsight, but also because they illustrate why media and analyst coverage often gets this stuff wrong in the first place — especially when it comes to Apple.

What I still can’t get over is the numerous takes that framed Microsoft’s failed ARM efforts as bad for Apple. The most common of which was effectively “ARM-based Macs might suck because Windows on ARM sucks.” Daring Fireball’s John Gruber took the high road when commenting on one of the pieces I mentioned from The Verge that used Windows on ARM as a cautionary tale for ARM-based Macs.

As with my previous item linking back to Rik Myslewski’s 2008 take on Apple’s acquisition of P.A. Semi, I am not trying to dunk on Dieter Bohn here. 18 months ago, these were all perfectly reasonable concerns.

I don’t think Dieter deserves to be dunked on for suggesting ARM-based Macs could be slower or have other trade-offs. I too wrongly speculated that may be the case when emulating x86. What I think merits dunking is suggesting that Windows on ARM could be used as some sort of model for what could happen with ARM-based Macs given how much faster Apple’s chips were compared to Qualcomm’s and Apple’s proven track record of migrating architectures. Everyone knew Microsoft had slower chips and everyone knew Windows had really never meaningfully run on any other architecture than x86.

While I think it’s gone better than anyone imagined thanks to the insanely fast performance of Apple Silicon, the fact is that the Mac’s transition to ARM was always going to be entirely different than that of Windows, and that was obvious from the get-go.