>> An ARM based Windows computer isn't a bad idea, I just question if Microsoft is able to deliver on it.
Microsoft has already executed and brutally failed with ARM in the form of the disastrous Surface RT/Windows RT.
But, and more importantly.
Two people with unlimited resources are running a race car race.
One starts a year or two before the other. Even with unlimited resources; the other racer/team has unlimited resources, too.
So let’s say they can both reach a maximum of the speed of sound.
Apple’s already been going the speed of sound for a couple years now; they also have the advantage that their vehicle in the race has software and hardware that are married.
Microsoft is not only nowhere near the speed of sound, but even though they also have unlimited resources; they are severely hampered by separate hardware and software, with the exclusion of their surface tablets, whose previous incarnation of this race car model crashed and burned on the race track.
This isn’t a race where MS can or will catch up. They’re already years behind. Not that I encourage anyone to use an OS with built-in ads anyway. Just use Linux at that point.
I think the primary reason that windows rt failed totally is no software can run on it at all. Not only you can't run x86 software. You can't even download random executable and run it. It is basically killed by ms itself. It is always a mystery to me that why ms would expect user to buy a device that nearly run nothing.
It looks like they want to address this. But I wonder if they will succeed this time.
>It is always a mystery to me that why ms would expect user to buy a device that nearly run nothing.
Because at the end of the day, Windows RT was a creature born of greed. They saw dollar signs- Apple's 30% App Store cut- and as such wanted a machine that forced you to buy software only from them. There was no technical reason that normal software couldn't run on Windows RT, given that MS themselves did it with Office.
So confident were they that this would work that they threw the tablet features onto Windows 8 proper, relegating the reason people buy computers to a secondary function- after all, paying MS for the privilege of developing software was going to be the New Way forward. Besides, don't you want security?
If MS showed up with a backward compatibility layer as good as Apple’s Rosetta, they’d instantly be a strong competitor. Maybe not for gaming systems or high-end workstations — at least not immediately — but in the huge space of people who want a battery sipping laptop with access to a vast amount of software they’re already using.
I don't think MS needs to push this if they want to succeed, they need to start making a consumer friendly machine that Windows runs fantastically on.
For an "acceptable" laptop, the price point is already pretty close to $1000, and before I would have a tentative recommendation of MacBooks/Macbook Airs because of the learning curve of MacOS. With M1/M2 and how much better it is than anything else on the consumer market, I openly recommend it to anyone in the market for a new consumer machine. Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine.
I was discussing this with a colleague last night, but the M1/M2 chips and complimentary hardware let Apple do some amazing stuff out of the box without adjustment that Windows simply has no answer for. The integration of the complimentary hardware with the M1/M2 chips is so strong that I stumbled onto features I completely missed announcements on, and it legitimately "wow'd" me.
- Live Text caught me off-guard while drag/drop-ing an image to a chat app. I couldn't stop testing its limits and reading the dev docs
- I took surprise calls from really crowded + noisy places and was in disbelief that my call partners couldn't hear anything but my voice in crystal clear quality
- I ran games and software that just weren't possible on Intel Macs through Rosetta at pretty fine FPS/quality without incident
- I didn't need to change a single program from my workflow
Microsoft can likely do the same but they need to put the legwork in to make it happen. Personally I understand they have no interest in this and it makes sense -- they want you on Azure with your server workloads and this keeps the lights on at Microsoft, and as best I know the consumer market (not considering gaming) still favors Windows. But I guess that's why projects like this confuse me a lot since it must be a pretty substantial RND and manufacturing cost, neverminding advertising, but Microsoft doesn't seem to have their heart in it.
It's not about backwards compatibility - consumers don't need to keep Windows 3.0 apps running, not a statistically significant portion anyways, they just need modern apps to run fast and well, long battery life on portable devices, quiet machines, and that's it, but seems that this just isn't something Microsoft is interested in taking over.
I really can't think of Windows features in decades that "wow" so much as you just know what you get with Windows regardless of the version in terms of basic features; what worked on Windows XP probably works on Windows 11, but even that is starting to erode in a slow and painful way. There are quite a few programs on Windows I get the impression that Microsoft just doesn't want me to be running, but things like the Windows Store, Windows' implementation of security for unsigned apps, etc, these all feel like Microsoft isn't confident enough to fully invest into these new features or to drop them in order to advance.
Microsoft definitely has the talent and cash reserves to pursue a strong consumer laptop to compete with Apple; for whatever reason, they don't seem to have the interest though for consumer devices. Probably the simplest reason is the server market is theirs and this is plenty of money, but I just can't get why they continue with such forays then.
Edit: just elaborated on price point for consumer laptops and recommending machines.
> Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine.
I don't expect "casual" gamers setup Wine+Proton+MoltenVK. It's better to say that let's play game on PlayStation. If you mean really "casual", they play on iPhone.
Microsoft has already executed and brutally failed with ARM in the form of the disastrous Surface RT/Windows RT.
But, and more importantly.
Two people with unlimited resources are running a race car race.
One starts a year or two before the other. Even with unlimited resources; the other racer/team has unlimited resources, too.
So let’s say they can both reach a maximum of the speed of sound.
Apple’s already been going the speed of sound for a couple years now; they also have the advantage that their vehicle in the race has software and hardware that are married.
Microsoft is not only nowhere near the speed of sound, but even though they also have unlimited resources; they are severely hampered by separate hardware and software, with the exclusion of their surface tablets, whose previous incarnation of this race car model crashed and burned on the race track.
This isn’t a race where MS can or will catch up. They’re already years behind. Not that I encourage anyone to use an OS with built-in ads anyway. Just use Linux at that point.