This, basically - if you target embedded, automotive, mobile (Android, perhaps), then having good native machines supporting the latest Armv9 features is helpful, compared to emulating it on another machine, or running stuff in the cloud.

Like I said, a niche, but not one that's nonexistent. I know Minisforum was hyping the Android angle a bit, though in my small amount of mobile app dev, I was happy enough doing that on my Mac.

Ironically, the most Linux on ARM I have experience with is from a VM on my Mac. It wouldn’t be perfect , but it’s pretty good for working with ARM. You aren’t emulating the CPU architecture, but you are running under virtualization.

I’m just thinking that the Mac Mini might also be better for that usecase, even with the virtualization in place. If you need to support a specific processor, you probably want to work with that exact processor. But if you want to use any ARM, a virtualized Linux running on a Mac isn’t a bad option.

Using UTM I managed to get a headless server running on the Mac mini that behaved better than the mini did. Eg mounted file servers actually mounted at boot reliably and container startup was controlled (maybe it’s me but desktop docker… ew).

The downside is that it eats into power usage. Even then, I’m averaging just 6.4w over 30 days.

portable code is starting to become valued in automotive. In the 8 bit era rewriting for each new modle was a good choice but there days code is too complex and so we need our code to survive longer than the cpus we start with. Often the cpus a car starts with are out of porduction before the model run is done. Car volumes are not big enough to keep a fab open.