Sorry to hear your bad experience, but with all due respect that's not a reasonable justification as to why one shouldn't consider Apple products. I've been part of the Apple ecosystem for over three decades and while there has been the occasional repair, it's been rare. It'd be like me advising someone else not to consider a Windows machine because I've had two PSU's fail, and I've had to replace the mouse.

Four repairs. My prior Apple computer died in three years.

Addendum: five repairs in a year. Apple broke a speaker replacing the logic board. Time to address crashing and defective board: one year.

Defective hardware is not relevant to this discussion imo as it happens everywhere to anyone. I don't go around telling everyone they shouldn't buy AMD just because the only 3 high end CPUs I got from them where barely usable and the customer service was almost non existant for professionals. Probably most people will say they are happy with AMD like when I say I never had an issue with Intel before.

Now on that note I am trying an apple computer for the first time with M1 Max as I would like to encourage the direction they are going in (more energy efficient with unified memory while still having decent performance,.. and a proper customer service finally!!!). So far no major issues with Houdini, just a few things I had to absolutely do on my Windows machine.

I would be interested in knowing what the plans are for an arm version of Houdini. Of course they have other priorities like many people said but I don't think the teams working on the high level features are the same as the teams working on low level development this needs. Maybe I'm wrong but can't know for sure how all that works internally without communication from SideFX.

Not quite fully related to the thread but perhaps useful to some, but at the moment the leader in Apple M1/ARM/Metal integration appears to be Blender. Blender was the first DCC to be fully ARM compliant, and things are moving very fast to make it fully Metal compliant as well.

I really hope that SideFX follows suit and recognizes ARM/SoC technology as the future. I can see in particular that SideFX could leverage the ML processors in the M1 to aid in simulations. I know that Apple has been the red-headed stepchild when it comes to DCC/CG apps, but all of that is poised to change soon, especially if they introduce a new Mac Pro capable of as much as four times the processing power of the most powerful M1 MAX.

This may be of interest regarding Blender.

Apple joins Blender Development Fund [www.blender.org]