> Why can't you update the Docker image to also support ARM? You theoretically could switch your backend to run ARM Linux. However, this would take months - renting out ARM instances, re-building all repositories, and a tense switch over.

I don't see why this would be so hard. If anything, I expect to see a massive upswing in things like AWS Graviton2 uptake, and a lot of common Docker images being built with ARM versions out of the box. It might be about a year or so, but eventually we'll be able to just go ARM-native the whole way.

What Apple needs to do is make a first-class, WSL-tier implementation of Docker for Mac for ARM.

>>> expect ... a lot of common Docker images being built with ARM versions out of the box.

This has no chance of happening. The common cloud CI systems do not support ARM at all (travis, circle CI and co). There is only a minority of developers with macbook and the rest is not going to spend $2000 to buy one just to build some docker images.

https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/multi-cpu-architectures

GitHub lists it as a feature now:

https://github.com/features/actions

I'd be very surprised if this didn't become more common given the high levels of interest people are showing towards ARM server offerings in the cloud space.