[Maarten88]

> Intel Macs can install Windows

Windows was already on ARM with Windows RT, for which I believe Microsoft did the work of porting UEFI and standardised bridge (PCI) technologies to ARM.

While speculating: Apple could conspire with Microsoft to standardise these technologies together to lock up their ecosystems against the Linux / Android monster :-)

[forgettableuser]

The hard part for Microsoft is not the porting of Windows to ARM. The hard part has been and continues to be convincing existing Windows developers to port their apps to UWP.

The reason Windows on Mac is useful to people is because people have may programs that do not have acceptable equivalents on Mac OS. These apps are usually legacy programs that probably fill special niches, and the cost of "modernizing" is usually not justified. This effort would be required to port these apps to Windows ARM, which last time around also required porting to UWP which Microsoft is still pushing, but not easy to actually do for a lot of code bases.

A new Microsoft irony kicks in here is that if they are successful in convincing the huge Windows ecosystem to migrate to UWP away from Win32, et. al, they may actually kill their lock-in advantage. A serious rewrite at this stage may also invite Mac, Linux, iOS, Android ports. In this case, Apple no longer needs to care about Intel Windows and this bullet point becomes less compelling and maybe they could reconsider.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

There's legacy software, and there's also games.

(But I'll freely admit that me being able to run games at sub-30fps on my MacBook Air is probably not Apple's intention.)

[Maarten88]

You can use the new Centennial technology to wrap an old Win32 application as an UWP Store app. If the app was made with .NET it might even run on ARM.

[pjmlp]

Yes, but only if distributed via the store, due to AOT compilation.

It wouldn't work for side loading unless doing it via Visual Studio.