[kyleplum]

I have faith in MS software development - I believe they can get windows on ARM working - but as far as I can tell, all non-Apple ARM hardware implementations are significantly lacking in the laptop space. There are vendors making decent phone chips, but I've seen no indication of the ability to scale up to a laptop in the way Apple Silicon has.

[macintux]

Apple’s key advantage here, though, is one Microsoft would never voluntarily embrace: abandoning x86-64 in favor of ARM.

Apple is willing to force its partners and customers to make the switch or get left behind. Microsoft would never do that, so Windows on ARM will presumably languish in application support indefinitely.

[SoftTalker]

Yes Apple is walking on familiar ground here. They abandoned M68K, then PPC, now Intel. They know they can do it, as they have done it before, and their customers will follow along, as they have done before.

[Shadonototra]

x86 is dead, full of security issues and is energy-intensive

smartphones, even embedded devices, including cars nowadays are all on ARM, servers are building momentum too, not because it is shiny, but because of tangible gains on many aspects

> Apple is willing to force its partners and customers to make the switch or get left behind.

That's not true at all, the chip doesn't matter when you sell software, hardware and services

It's like changing the internals of your Camera to provide a better experience and quality, why do you care about it? in fact you don't! You want a better Camera, company will pick what's best for the better Camera

Apple provide a transparent translation layer to accompany the transition with Rosetta, it's effortless for the users

That's the problem of Microsoft, they are incapable of designing proper UX solution to accompany their customers to better solutions, instead they force their customers to be stuck with inefficient solution, Microsoft don't even care nor dare cleaning their OS to provide up-to-date solutions

It's a bloaty mess of 5 generations of different UI/UX

Choosing Windows prevents you from having a seamless experience from your Watch -> Phone -> Desktop -> Car

That's what Microsoft fanboy don't understand, they protect their poor decision making, their inefficient products and ultimately, it leads to the death of their products

Microsoft Windows consumers are stuck

That's why Windows Mobile, Metro, UWP, WinUI all flopped, the platform is no longer up to date

And it's not just a chip issue, it's the whole ecosystem and culture, always too late to make changes, and here, incapable of providing a transition path, hence they are failing behind apple

[paulmd]

> x86 is dead, full of security issues

to be clear though: spectre/meltdown are not an x86 issue. POWER, SPARC, and indeed even ARM (although only some of their products have OoO/speculation) were affected as well. There is no magic to ARM that magically makes it secure if you don't protect against side-effecting.

I generally agree with the rest of your points, Microsoft is stuck in legacy hell with x86 and they are stuck with a customer base that specifically values that (everyone else has departed for linux or osx, they have "dead sea effect"ed themselves into a high-maintenance customer base), and they've done a super shitty job in general with 5 different generations of UX lava-layered over the top, and x86 is clearly falling behind in energy efficiency. But security isn't something intrinsic to ARM or x86, you can design a secure x86 processor and you can design an insecure ARM processor.

[jcranmer]

> to be clear though: spectre/meltdown are not an x86 issue. POWER, SPARC, and indeed even ARM (although only some of their products have OoO/speculation) were affected as well. There is no magic to ARM that magically makes it secure if you don't protect against side-effecting.

IIRC, M1 was even vulnerable to some of the otherwise Intel-only Meltdown (cross-privilege boundaries) exploits, let alone the more-or-less ubiquitous Spectre (only within same-privilege boundaries) exploits.

[paulmd]

Meltdown wasn't Intel-only - POWER and ARM A75 were affected as well. Meltdown affected everyone except AMD (who have had a similar issue surface themselves recently with their implementation of the PREFETCH instruction) and SPARC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...

You're not in the minority for thinking this, there was some serious journalistic miscarriage there. To a lot of people, Intel and AMD are the whole world and if it doesn't affect AMD then it's Intel-only. Even people in tech journalism.

(thought I remember Oracle eventually admitting SPARC was vulnerable as well but I can't find it so maybe not)

[jcranmer]

> You're not in the minority for thinking this, there was some serious journalistic miscarriage there. To a lot of people, Intel and AMD are the whole world and if it doesn't affect AMD then it's Intel-only. Even people in journalism.

As I recall, the initial investigation focused on Intel, AMD, and some ARM implementations, so that was what was reported; I personally didn't attempt to follow up on any subsequent investigations on other architectures, so I was unaware of any specific results on SPARC et al, good or bad.

[jmclnx]

> That's not true at all, the chip doesn't matter when you sell software, hardware and services

Yes they do, I am typing this in a fully functional 10+ year old Thinkpad running Linux and getting updates to software.

I know people with with Apple Laptops that they can no longer get security updates due to the chip change. There only option is to install another OS to keep on that hardware.

But they chose to pay for a brand new model instead of leaving their OS of choice.

So, Apple is able to pull these people along raking in the doe because they are willing to send 1500+ USD to Apple every few years.

Good for Apple, PT Barnum comes to mind with Apple.

[Shadonototra]

> I know people with with Apple Laptops that they can no longer get security updates due to the chip change. There only option is to install another OS to keep on that hardware.

Why do you lie? The newly announced macOS supports Intel based macs

https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/06/macos-13-ventura-supported-ma...

[jmclnx]

Someone I know is unable to upgrade their MAC, I do not know what kind or how old it is. But is is not that old, maybe 10 years or so.

[ChuckNorris89]

>That's what Microsoft fanboy don't understand

Maybe if you stop accusing people of being fanboys, discussions could be more productive.

In fact, your entire post is all trolling, FUD, and no substance or arguments.

[Shadonototra]

We can never complain about Microsoft and Windows, it is always seen as "trolling", FUD, or arguments with no substance, despite everything being already documented and archived for over a decade, I'm not going to turn a comment into a 10 pages essay when you can just with the help of a google search find the documented claims i am making

When you hide the problems, they resurface years later, and here we are!

Apple moving to ARM allows their entire lineup to have a seamless ecosystem, apps runs natively everywhere, iOS/iPadOS/macOS

Microsoft indeed is stuck and had to come up with a full VM to support an OS with a different architecture, and android apps for a different kind of chip! is that FUD? am i a troll? come on, let's be serious!

[ChuckNorris89]

Except you haven't made any factual arguments here. Your comments can be summarized just as "Microsoft sucks, Apple is the best !!!111one".

[Shadonototra]

> Your comments can be summarized just as "Microsoft sucks, Apple is the best !!!111one".

Exactly, i used to use microsoft products, until recently i switched all my machines to linux, i don't even use apple products, i have an M1 only just to test my software, for everything else it's a VM

My claims are objectives, from experience, and everything is documented and archived

To your blind fanboy eyes only the opposite can be true?, "apple sucks, microsoft is the best?"

You might be living in an alternate reality where "Windows Phone XAML Edition Pro 2004" is #1 in the charts, and the cloud native OS is "Windows Bloated Server Millenium 1914 Product of Seattle Hell Yeah Brother"

[MBCook]

Yeah, my impression is that the arm windows laptops were basically using cell phone chips.

And if you consider that arm cellphone chips are already behind Apple cellphone chips (which the M1/2 improved on)… not great performance for windows.

[cowtools]

even if they can get windows on ARM working, they still need to get vendors to distribute ARM versions of their software. This is another leg up for apple and the humble penguin.

[mwcampbell]

How is this an advantage for desktop Linux? Yes, open-source software can simply be recompiled, but desktop Linux-based platforms (particularly GNU/Linux) have never been great for proprietary app developers, and adding ARM to the mix doesn't make this any better.