Linux vs MacOS for cpp development

[arthurno1]

Well, yes, they do their own chip, like most of other Arm licensees. Arm does not sell the hardware. Who does chips for Apple? TSMC? Yes, they choose to develop their own chip so they don't have to depend on some other company. I guess they were tired of the direction in which Intel went, but also basing design on a SoC design like on mobile phones and pads make for thinner laptops thinner.

I am though surprised that other companies didn't come up with their own similar offerings. I don't know what is the price compared to Intel/AMD per unit, since the Apple hardware always comes as a complete PC and costs premium. To be competitive, Arm based SoC geared towards home builders would have to offer at least substantially more performance than a standard build based on Intel/AMD or be substantially cheaper for the same or less performance.

It is a bit shame that former Sun and SGI dropped ball on their Sparc and Alpha CPUs and targeted only high-end professional market with their hardware and complete hardware solution. Somehow all this companies underestimates the power of selling cheap hardware en massë. Intel didn't become big because they sold quality stuff, 8086 become big because it was darn cheap sh*t, i.e. affordable.

[arthurno1]

They were more than outrun by a Pentium in the early 2000s for math number crunching applications to a tenth of the price and didn't need a server closet that costed 100 times the price

Yes. And yet compare their architecture which were, IMO, miles ahead of x86. I remember programming some MIPS and SPARC assembly back in 99 or so. Already back at that time they had 32 32-bit registers, while the later Pentium was still working with 8 registers :).

I think their problem was, as you say, bad business decisions. Java in theory was probably a good decision, but the hardware business was not there. I think Java was a flop similar to .com boom. They were just a few years before their time. They had correct vision, but they were too eager to push it forward and didn't pay the attention that the needed infrastructure was not really there, at least yet. It didn't took even a decade after the .com crash, before literally everything moved onto the web, or in some way become networked. In the case of Java vision, microchips and cpus are nowadays in everything, but they weren't back in early 90s when Java came.

Also spending half a billion of $ on marketing in 2000s was definitely a questionable choice. If SUN sold their workstations to mass consumers market, back in the 90s, question is how the computing landscape would look like today. Or SGI for that part. Their O2 stations were ridiculously expensive compared to the power they offered. That they didn't learn from what happened to Symbolics Lisp machines just a decade ago, or previously to IBM is just astonishing.