Apple’s first home-made chip, the Apple M1, has been welcomed by many users, but as they get their hands on the real thing, a number of problems have been exposed.

Some users found that most architectures, except for the AMD64 architecture, did not run on ARM. If the operation is “forced”, it will greatly increase the operating cost.

Some of the tools and libraries are open source projects, so the increased maintenance requirements will be an additional burden, causing some contributors to simply abandon support on the new Mac platform.

There are also some applications, especially closed source projects, that do not have an ARM build at all, such as Microsoft SQL Server or OracleDB.

The ARM architecture does not support Windows

The not-so-good news is that the ARM architecture definitely doesn’t support Windows.

If developers want to test their Windows apps on the new Mac. You’ll have to buy another laptop or use Remote Desktop. In addition, developers cannot run virtual machines on the Mac for device testing (e.g. ESXI, PFSense, Freenas, etc.).

Docker is affected

The fact that Docker on a Mac can only run inside a virtual machine, coupled with the fact that users can only virtualize Linux based on the ARM architecture, means that we will only be able to run ARM64 containers on Apple’s Mac on a chip in the future.

Currently, there are 3,399,219 images for AMD64 on Docker Hub, but only 29,076 images for ARM64, accounting for less than 1%. Furthermore, building multi-schema Docker images is particularly complex.

In particular, because production systems typically run Linux/AMD64, it is likely that your produced binaries and Docker images will not run on your development computer. Sure, you might be able to recompile and cross-compile, but you’ll never get it back to its true running state. Also, if your application runs into problems in production, you can’t debug it on your laptop using binaries or container images alone.

Docker is an important part of a developer’s daily workflow, so this is quite a headache for developers.

Reference data: www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/jpzt43/docker_for_mac_on_apple_silicon_keynote/