No. Macs have never been PC's, until recently. Intel/AMD processors and their chipsets make a PC. Windows is the defacto OS for a PC. Hence why the platform has oft been called "Wintel". It's never been called "Winorola" or "WinPPC". The PC version of Windows runs on Intel Macs. Therefore, that makes the Mac the same as a PC. Just because another version of Windows is made available for a platform does not make automatically make it a PC. It's simply a native version of Windows for that platform. Fine by me that an ARM version of Windows exists... and fine if M1 users decide to boot it. It's "ARM Windows running on a Mac", not "PC version of Windows running on a Mac", which makes it... a PC, simply CALLED a Mac by Apple. Remember the ad, "Hello... I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. And I'm ALSO a PC!" That single ad PROVED my point! It blew my mind, when Apple actually ADMITTED to it! I've been looking for that single ad, to show people my point, but seems it's rather hard to find.
What are you talking about? Ok, long post incoming...
First of all, you get the Apple ads about ”Macs vs PCs” is (very successful) marketing, right? Macs have always been personal computers. Apple didn’t “admit” anything, it was branding. Macs are PCs.
And Windows has run on other PC architectures than x86 before, in addition to the short lived PPC vers I already mentioned, off the top of my head, it has run on: ARM (both older codebases on older ARM implementations, including 2 failed simplified versions of windows, and the newer complete implementation of Windows 10), Alpha, Itanium (which was being pushed for a while as the future before AMD blew the P4 era intel chips away with AMD64 and ensured Windows staying on x86 as the dominant consumer architecture for another 20 years at least), and MIPS.
tl;dr of above, PCs, even *Windows PCs* are not just Intel/x86 and never have been. “Wintel” was coined because of how common that combo became (in part because of abusive market practices by Intel), not because that was the definition of “PC”.
Now, onto modern AS Macs (and bringing this back around to the original topic); AS is Apple’s implementation of ARM64, and just like MacOS supports ARM and x86 right now, so does Windows. The main and only real barrier to bootcamp working with on M1 Macs basically exactly the same as x86 MacOS and x86 Windows can coexist on Intel Macs is that Microsoft doesnt currently as openly license the ARM builds for Windows. I would be willing to wager $100 right now that Apple already has internal Windows drivers for ARM bootcamp and a ARM version of the bootcamp assistant ready and waiting if MS changes licensing. And just like running x86 Windows on an Intel Mac is indistinguishable from any other nice hardware running x86 Windows, the same would (hopefully will, assuming MS updates their licensing) be true of running ARM Windows on AS Macs and other ARM PCs (and yes, M1 Macs are ARM based PCs). Hell, you can install Windows on a Raspberry Pi 4, it’s not super performant but it works well enough, and architecturally, as far as Windows is concerned, it’s just like an AS Mac - for our purposes on this post at least.
I would also bet that just like there is a very active x86 based hackintosh scene there will be a similar scene soon for ARM. Getting Big Sur onto a a raspberry pi and other ARM PCs, including ones Windows already runs on, and including more powerful ones to come as ARM makes more and more inroads onto the desktop is going to be a major goal of a *lot* of folks. I give it a very very good chance of happening.
All of which brings us back to SIP and expectations of PCs. Macs are expected to, basically, listen to you more than a locked down mobile device. They are a PC, and they are aimed at general computing use, including development (“tinkering”). If I turn off SIP using Apple’s documented procedure it shouldn’t cripple the system in unexpected ways - especially when, assuming MS relaxes their licensing, we get Windows on these machines, or when we get Linux/BSD/etc on these machines, that problem wont exist on those platforms.
