I love these sorts of debates. It's trying to dictate what stupid people should buy.
Apple has, since the Lisa, and always has sold specifically to stupid people, and I don't just mean that as an insult. Objectively, they specifically designed their machines for people who were too stupid to operate a CP/M or DOS prompt, and couldn't be arsed to learn how. The flashy windowing system and hipster design made it quite attractive to people who just wanted a computer, and didn't really give a shit about how powerful it was.
At the end of the day, if someone wants to buy a Macintosh, or other Apple product, they will. Screeching about it in a forum doesn't make it any better. I'm sure most people in the tech industry with a brain and a general understanding of mathematics could see that a crippled Unix workstation based on the same hardware architecture as the IBM PC, just heavily marked up, is an entirely stupid idea, especially considering you could get a much better Unix experience with a couple of cheap Xeons and a fresh install of FreeBSD, or your choice of now free Unix distro.
Idk what Halcyon is on about with forcing people to buy Apple hardware, maybe he means Apple's restrictive ecosystem. At least OS/X doesn't as severely limit what you can do unlike iOS, where the concept of installing your own applications is one that's met with haughty derision, followed by a kind, warm, pat on the back by the jailbreak developers who presumably were stuck with an iPhone after their nan bought them one for Christmas, so decided to make the best out of it. (Maybe a bit of humorous (I hope) projection here, but I'll move on)
ARM is best suited for eating next to no power, making very little heat, and kicking ass at very mobile tasks. I wouldn't ask an ARM CPU for a second to do something like proper video editing or any real CPU workloading. This is one reason why I don't fricking trust x86 compatible Windows NT on ARM.
x86 is the classic workhorse. Despite being outclassed at times by RISC chips like, well pretty much all of them, they have persevered to become the largest and most significant processor architecture in the industry. Apple abandoning it is another Apple move. They've done it before, and they may do it again. Screaming at people about how bad it it doesn't really do much, it's best to let people find out.
The thing that pisses me off about modern Macs is they don't even have any element of class that older Macs did. What I mean by that is you could run a G3/4/5 tower with PCI cards, a custom configuaration, etc. You could run it as it was, a unique RISC Unix workstation with it's own special architecture. As a legacy hardware enthusiast, that just sings to me. Even older NuBus machines like the Macintosh 2 just attract me so much. Today, you just get a load of below the curve parts that they sell without update for years without price cuts. Macintoshes are and always have been the machine for idiots.