| > Microsoft’s efforts are more likely to result in a server chip than one for its Surface devices In my opinion, the majority of people have too much faith in their ability to predict the future. I was terrible at predicting the real world performance of the Apple Silicon M1. It is, in fact, much better than I expected. On the other hand, Microsoft has thus far only had slightly modified AMD chips in their Surface Laptop, and poor performing ARM-designed Qualcomm chips in their Surface Pro X. Maybe I'll be bad at predicting the future, but I do not expect excellent performance out of Microsoft's Surface chips in the next 365 days. Probably longer. In the meantime, more Windows computers will be sold than MacOS, and they will have mostly Intel chips, but an increasingly large number of AMD chips. AMD has survived with less diverse revenue streams and much worse product portfolios. I'm optimistic for how they'll do over the next several years. |
I expected what came out in the end. Apple would never put up the amount of money and the promise to ditch Intel if they were not absolutely certain that they could actually beat Intel performance-wise and have a working Rosetta to keep "old" software running.
The writing was on the wall for a long time, iPhone and iPad processor power has been taking decent shots at moderately powerful PC hardware for years now - the key thing why Apple didn't do it two years ago was software support and developer tooling, they wanted to avoid cloning the Windows RT fiasco which fizzled out because no one had working software and there was no translation layer.