Re: Back to the 90s?
>Do we need to start caring about what the underlying hardware is again?
Probably not in the same way. In the nineties, a PC wouldn't even read a Mac floppy disk without faffing. Documents weren't as portable between operating systems. You were more tied to the operating system you are using. Okay, that's OS stuff, not cpu architecture per se.
Today, a lot of useful work can be done in a web browser - emailing, word processing, printing, etc, and most of us switch between OSs (Android, Windows, iOS, MacOS, Linux) many times a day. We expect to edit (or at least view) documents between them.
In addition, we're already all using computers with CPUs, GPUs, DSPs - different architectures for different jobs - inside them.
I heard it said that the Motorola CPUs (Atari, Mac) were better suited to music production in the '90s. And it was music and DTP that allowed Apple to survive that decade (Windows didn't have any means for system wide document colour management). Again, not an architecture thing. The inclusion of FireWire as standard (originally for high Res scanners) in Macs helped them in the early 2000s get the audio and video editing market.