Will Apple M1 mean better support for Raspberry Pi?

I don't expect it to make a measurable difference. Android and iOS have already pushed ARM support and optimizations in programming languages and key libraries.

For macOS, the support revolves around Xcode. Cross-compilation support is Apple-specific and won't benefit Linux. CPU architecture is abstracted away in macOS as much as possible, so average developers won't think much about ARM support.

Where Apple wants developers to tune for M1 specifically, is their proprietary frameworks for ML acceleration and Metal, which don't benefit anyone but Apple.

At best there may be some halo effect from proving that ARM can be as fast as "real" desktop CPUs, and it's not just the low-end slow Qualcomm chips. That might legitimize running ARM on servers, but Pi is neither high-end desktop nor a server platform.

Honestly, I doubt it. Just as investments into macOS support don't typically help Linux much.

It'd be awesome if Apple would let Raspberry Pi use their M1 chips, but clearly that's never going to happen!

Lets go back to 2006 and ask this question in retrospect:

Will Apples move to Intel mean better support for the PC?

Answer: No.

Yes, for sure. It means that compilers will be pushed even harder to be efficient on ARM architectures.

Hopefully, it'd be nice to have some measures to ensure extremely cheap new computers (thinking of the Pi 400) would provide everything a child might need to do their school work without having to depend on bottom of the barrel 2GB ram laptop being sold at way more than they're worth

Apple doesn't support open source that much - they could do SO much better.

But they do support clang.

Do you think they can make a Pi Hackingtosh now?

I don't think we'll see much change in consumer apps as you still have the Mac -> Linux jump. We might see fewer ARM-related bugs, but were there many of these anyway?

Where I think it's a game-changer is in Docker images. A lot of projects only build x86_64 images, M1 means they'll build ARM images as well

Virtualization tools and host OSes will probably see a huge boost in ARM support as well, but the Raspberry Pi is a bit too limited to really take advantage of these improvements.

you can use archlinux ARM on your Pi if your want up-to-date packages, it works fine.

I would like to see an M1 in a ThinkPad... But Apple with macOS only and the big obstacles against Linux will probably not help the Raspberry Pi ...

I think it depends if Apple M1 and Raspberry Pi ARM are compatible. I can imagine that open-source projects will work on trying to get it going under ARM so it can be used on Apple Sillicon Macs as you can't emulate x86 on them.

A side-effect of the above is that the projects will also support other ARM-based chipsets, such as Raspberry Pi's

I believe that yes, that is true. The builds are ultimately made by developers, developers want software to run on their own machines, developers will buy M1 Macs if only for the novelty factor.

Yes.

It's just another example of why non-portable code is silly.

TL;DR - Yes, but after few years. And will be indirect.

So - before M1 announce ARM market was reserved for battery devices when huge limitation is power for them. Performance was important, but most important is power consumption.

There was also some niche server-side ARM like Marvell ThunderX, Qualcomm Centriq or Amazon Graviton.

Actually Apple acquire P.A. Semi company in 2008 and before that they're known for PWRficient processors.

Now M1 release shock whole industry.

First PC manufacturers like Dell or HP - but for now they're tied with vendors as Intel and Microsoft. Second Cloud operators like Digital Ocean and Google - only Amazon have their own ARM CPU. Third OS vendors like Microsoft - they're having a Windows RT in past and need to revive it ASAP. Forth are CPU vendors like Intel, AMD that providing x86 and Broadcom, Qualcomm that are ARM - because first can seen how their x86 product line is outperform from ARM products. And other can seen how even their top ARM products are outperform from niche player as Apple.

In result - expect shortly a HUGE investments in post-x86 for different chips architectures and as result RPi will be improvement. But not today!

PS: Do you remember Russian CPU Elbrus? It's VLIW! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUNJ_tkq2hk