Apple's outright said it's a matter of Microsoft agreeing to license Windows on ARM for consumers. Right now putting Windows on an ARM Mac is about as legal as Hackintoshing.
I don't think that's what Apple said at all–they just said the ball is in their court, which means that they want Microsoft to write Bootcamp essentially.
Yeah. Someone - cough cough Microsoft - would need to be convinced to write a Boot Camp Assistant app equivalent (okay), a Windows bootloader (okay), various device drivers for Apple Silicon hardware revisions for Windows (big ugh), graphics drivers for Apple Silicon GPUs for Windows (VERY big ugh). Microsoft will need to very motivated to distribute Windows on ARM for this to happen, even if Apple gives them access to all the info they need which is not a given by any means.
...I don't think this is going to happen, and Apple probably doesn't either.
Apple have developed Bootcamp and provided drivers so far for Intel Mac. But shipping Bootcamp for Windows ARM would be an EULA violation until Microsoft loosen theirs conditions. Changing this is literally step 1.
Wether Apple would develop Bootcamp for ARM or not is purely theoretical discourse until then.
The only driver Apples needed to develop for Windows are Mac specifics though, like the stuff that was managed by the T1. Not trivial, but not the end of the world to have to make. Things like wifi drivers and especially the graphics drivers are just the chip vendor's standard preexisting Windows drivers.
Apple is now the vendor of at least the GPU. I don't think they're going to write a Windows driver for that - the incentives are just not there.
What you were possibly remembering was that Windows on ARM when it was first introduced only supported emulating x86 apps. Although x64 emulation is currently in preview.
That would make a lot of sense. Windows is in a tight spot right now because OEMs have lagged on ARM. Apple could offer MS a way out of that, while at the same time giving people one more reason to spend money on a Mac.
There is a significant number of people working at Microsoft who use Windows on a Mac as it's generally nice (and expensive) hardware. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to see Bootcamp operational on ARM Macs.
Right, if MS is serious about Windows on ARM, they should support the Mac as a show case and also to allow all future Mac buyers the chance to run Windows. Of course, Apple can't announce much until Microsoft makes an announcement about Windows on AS Macs.
Is MS not busy looking at doing their own ARM silicon for future Windows powered Surface devices after release of M1 and the failure Qualcomm with the Snapdragon 8cx (we just use ARM reference designs) ???.
They do have the chops for it since they have done Xbox and Hololens and various other devices in-house.
Maybe they are already developing their own "MS1" in secret ?
But even if they are, it would make sense to release Windows 10 for the M1 and getting Win-developers to start porting their applications to ARM, so they could leap-frog Apple on ARM if they manage to build a 'better' ARM SoC
Or they could take significant market share away from Windows, possibly permanently, by offering increasingly more performant machines. Seems like a better move to me.
Linus Tech Tips actually just released a video a couple of hours ago where they compared the Surface Pro X SQ2 with the M1 MacBook Air. It was not pretty.
So basically, the M1 Macbook Air is two to three times faster than the SQ2, including comparing ARM Windows on the SQ2 against ARM Windows in a VM on the M1 Air.
Relatedly, I wrote this on Twitter a few weeks ago:
cargo build of sccache on a Lenovo Yoga C630 (Snapdragon 850) in WSL: 4 minutes 55 seconds. On a Macbook Air M1: 55 seconds
WSL 1 or 2? WSL 1 has very slow disk access, so compiling can be pretty slow. I.e. I would expect WSL to be slower for disk reasons even it was running on an M1.
He’s off on the strategic focus of Apple (where he says that the M1 benefit because Apple is taking a mobile OS and adapting it for the desktop vs Microsoft is taking a desktop OS and adapting it for mobile architectures. The truth of the matter is that Apple has been consistently making CPUs for about a decade that blow away the competition on compute per watt. Like 2-3 years before the industry catches up to where Apple was. They’re just bringing that same power to laptops/PCs as they’ve saturated what that buys them on mobile (not fully but it’s not a big enough sales driver as mobile sales growth has slowed). That’s why you see AirPods and M1 - “where else can we deploy our perf per watt and vertical integration advantage”.
As for “why are there so few ARM versions of apps”, that’s purely the vertical integration piece again. Apple makes it very clear the old tech line is dead so developers have a clear thing to explain to their management. Microsoft tries to keep everyone happy which means devs are like “I’ll wait until this actually has industry buy in” which then Microsoft uses as “well there’s no interest here and maybe the tech won’t work out/vendors won’t materialize” and “we can’t ask our customers to pay this transition cost”.
Is there any point of running windows outside of intel processors? I'm aware they have an ARM offering but it's not clear what the "killer apps" of the OS/arch pair are.
I'd think linux/BSD drivers would be the concern here!