Apple announced that it was moving to Apple Silicone in WWDC 2020. Yes, every one knew it was coming but still it is a significant move. This unification should excite us all. Yet the software engineer and web developer in me was a little worried. Let me explain...

I am not your garden variety Asian web developer. I am expert in Ruby and specialized in building and maintaining SaaS applications for small to large organizations. I work on a variety of mission critical projects spanning across variety of operating systems and versions. Some of these projects have multiple sub projects each on their own server. When working on features I recreate the production environment locally. This eliminates the problem "it works on my machine" problem as "my computer" is almost an exact replica of the production environment.

I generally use Vagrant which in turn configures virtual machines using Chef configuration management tool on VirtualBox. VirtualBox is free.

How ever if I move to an ARM Mac, I won't be able to emulate X64 using VirtualBox. Apple also stated that Bootcamp would be available in Apple Silicone. They have also not mentioned any thing about a virtualization solution that can emulate the processor. That leaves us with some thing like Parallels which comes as a subscription.

If some thing like Parallels can't emulate the processor (which I am not sure) then I am afraid we will have to test our applications on a could provider and that is not an ideal solution. For starters its a little costly. Then your development workflow depends on the availability of a good internet connection. There are times I have patched bugs and pushed to production in areas with very poor internet connection.

Given I have a iMac on Intel Silicone I don't have to worry that much. 3 or 4 years is plenty of time for new solutions to popup. But I wonder how it will be when I decommission my HP Laptop running Linux and move to an Apple MacBook Pro rocking Apple Silicone. I think I will have to skip the first generation.