2. The software development toolchain is highly focussed
3. they committed. there are no more intel cpus so developers can either adapt or die. windows by contrast has x86 and arm builds going forward. that means a larger surface area for developers to target and they will avoid that kind of pain if they can.
4. microsoft management is all over the place and lacks the focus that apple has. Apple doesn't do everything right but when they want to do something well. it shows. even their failures are polished.
Apple's developer IDE was ready to go on day one.
Apple's Rosetta translation layer was much more widely compatible with legacy x86 software than Microsoft's Prism.
It sounds like Microsoft was involved in this project (though the text seems to imply Qualcomm might have been the primary contributor), it remains that they didn't do it however many years ago when Windows on ARM was first released.
Much easier than a big bang replacement.
I mean they have been trying since Windows RT on the original surface tablet 13 years ago.
Performance of every day tasks on the Surface is excellent, it sips power, and Microsoft has done a great job with their x86 emulation layer (Prism). Most x86 apps (including games!) work without any involvement from the user. In the few cases I ran into issues, tweaking the emulation settings for the app fixed the issue, and I think there was only one app that refused to run, though I don't remember what it was right now. Performance even with emulation is pretty good.
This experience is light years ahead of Windows RT, and even Windows on ARM from a few years ago.
So I don't think Microsoft's interest in ARM is waning anytime soon. They're clearly heavily invested in it, and the hard work has been paying off.
The last thing I was waiting on was Zed, which now works on Windows ARM as of a couple weeks ago (though there aren't official builds yet so I build it from source).
Hate to hand it to Microsoft but it's just a really versatile and powerful device.
No incentive for third parties. Apple dictates the hardware, and can say "no more x86" and devs either have to jump on board or abandon Apple.
No such thing with Windows. x86 is still the default on windows laptops, and will likely be for the foreseeable future. The X elite still seems to have no successor in the pipeline, and the few laptops that have it don't outsell x86 so why bother.
Nah, high performance RISC-V (on RVA23 profile) is just around the corner.
Might come as early as by year end. Early next year at worst.
We've known about Windows for RISC-V since 2021, NA's RISC-V Summit. Like Google with Android, Microsoft has set RVA23 as baseline.
Once the hardware and Windows are there, expect the open platform to take over.
Microsoft has exactly none of that. I'd be astonished to see RISC-V or ARM "take over" in the Windows world in less than another two decades, unless Intel's ongoing decline drags the entire X86 platform with it.
I don't think that's fair. They provided a very smooth transition, with a well performing translation layer. The user wouldn't have to care or even notice when they picked up a new ARM MacBook, except their battery lasted way longer and cooler. Everything that worked still worked (well, 64bit at least). I'm still running x86-64 apps, and developing for x86-64, on my ARM MacBook.
When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well. They nuked the customer perception on day 1. When they finally implemented the x86 compatibility, it had terrible performance and compatibility.
Now, Apple's 32-bit to 64-bit transition was definitely a "jump on board or abandon Apple", but the Intel to Arm transition was well crafted, from a user perspective.
It was worse than this. Source compatibility with the Win32 APIs you would use for ~20 years to target x86/amd64 was explicitly a non goal. To target ARM you needed to use their new, half-baked frameworks designed for the Windows 8 tablets. You couldn't recompile a desktop app, even if it would have worked fine had they given you the headers and libs to do it.
Even internally, even among decision makers, people were very confused about this.
Microsoft has made multiple abortive lethargic gestures towards ARM, but has yet to get people excited about an ARM computer that runs Windows.
Having said all that, I've been using a Snapdragon Elite X laptop since day one and the experience has gotten better over the year plus I've been using it. Once there was a native port of command line git (yes, THAT didn't even work) - my life got a lot better.
With Apple it really is a transition, with Windows, it's well under 5% of PC sales, so probably under 1% of actual computers in use.
Apple is 100% on board with ARM, Microsoft isn't and the OEMs even less so, you can barely buy an ARM Windows desktop, only thin laptops.
Where I work, we ship Windows desktops for an industrial application, and we haven't even had a meeting about supporting ARM, it's like they don't exist.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/mediatek-designs-arm-base...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/nvidia-and-m...
bhouston•6h ago
Blender is just so nice to use these days.
Hydraulix989•5h ago
seba_dos1•4h ago
geraldcombs•5h ago
It's not just Windows, either. Many libraries (particularly ones that use Autotools) are absolutely blind to the notion that you might want a universal binary on macOS.
astrange•3h ago
IIRC it was eventually removed because nobody else needed to do such a thing so it was hard to maintain.
kccqzy•3h ago
geraldcombs•2h ago
kccqzy•2h ago
delta_p_delta_x•22m ago
zdw•1h ago
Uehreka•1h ago
Wait WHAT?! Since when?
bhouston•1h ago
geon•1h ago