The walled garden is an advantage of some sort, but they’ve also never made a bad call on switching architectures.

We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium. It’s quite possible they don’t have the clout to pull it off.

(Maybe they should have gone Intel instead of PPC, but both were significantly better than m68k at that point)

> they’ve also never made a bad call on switching architectures.

It seems more like they have a high willingness to switch architectures.

Predicting which one is better in the year that you do it or the couple of years after isn't that hard. The question is, where is it going to be in a decade or two?

Each time they picked a huge company you wouldn't have expected to fail in that year, first IBM, then Intel. But that's the problem with huge companies, after a few years on top they tend to get complacent and stagnate.

Now Apple itself is the big company, but it remains to be seen if they're not still going to end up on e.g. RISC-V within the next ten years or so.

>We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium

Apple made a few mistakes, but mostly by trying to compete with doomed hype markets like AR/VR.

Some also ponder what the ecosystem would look like today if the Windows NT kernel had stayed on RISC like initially planned.

The "What if __ ?" universe are fun to imagine, but ultimately less important than the "What now?" universe we live in. =3