[nerdjon]

> Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers.

I know that Mac was always in single digit marketshare (but still a healthy amount as far as money for apple goes) but still doubling seems to be quite an achievement?

I am curious if this is actually from an increase in Mac sales or a decrease in PC sales and Mac has just been stable? Or a mix of both. I will need to look this up. (Side note: I HATE when we see something as unhelpful as "doubled" and they could have included some numbers at least).

On the topic of the article, I was kinda surprised to see that Microsoft has some initiates for Windows on Arm. I know it was technically a thing but it seemed like a thing that we just stopped hearing about?

Do they have an answer to rosetta so the transition can be mostly seamless (for everyone except developers if the M series is any indication...).

Also I have to wonder how much pre-built Windows computers are still sold vs moving to non traditional platforms like an iPad?

I am curious because gaming will likely never move to arm. Unless I have missed it I have never seen ARM in a system that you can build yourself. Even Apple's ARM Mac Pro is questionably "Customizable" after the fact. I just don't see most PC gamers giving up the upgradability.

[brucethemoose2]

> gaming will likely never move to arm.

Oh, it can if Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft push it.

Most of the back catalog can probably run fine emulated, though you may want to stick to x86 for those older CPU bound sim games that aren't going to get a recompile.

[nerdjon]

You missed the part after it. The first problem is software, which given what Apple managed with Rosetta I think will be able to be addressed.

But the big problem is hardware. Are we going to see customizable ARM systems or are all ARM systems going to be basically SOC's and basically just be a console. Maybe with an expansion port for something other than graphics?

I am asking because to my knowledge we have not seen this yet. But upgradability and building your own computer is a big reason that people choose a PC vs a console.

Is this a limitation of ARM (and could Nvidia, AMD, and Microsoft just go down that same path) or is it just a limitation of how it has been implemented so far.

If it is perfectly feasible, would we still see the big performance improvements like we are seeing on the M chips with everything combined?

[brucethemoose2]

> But upgradability and building your own computer is a big reason that people choose a PC vs a console.

I hate to break it to PC builders, but DIMMs are starting to max out, signal integrity over those pins is becoming a problem. Before long, CPU RAM is probably gonna be soldered and packaged with the CPU anyway.

The architecture won't necessarily be like Apple though. The CPU/GPU could be their own tiles, meaning we could have GPU-less SKUs that still use PCIe GPUs. And the SoCs or whatever they are can still be socketed.

[deaddodo]

> Do they have an answer to rosetta so the transition can be mostly seamless (for everyone except developers if the M series is any indication...).

Microsoft had an AoT x86->ARM (and now, amd64->aarch64) binary translation layer before Apple's Rosetta had that capability (at least, publicly).

[jacooper]

Yes but it's still terrible with a much bigger performance loss than rosseta, partially because the M chips have some tricks for better emulation.

[deaddodo]

The performance is actually much better than most people from that skillset originally expected, and it generally gets better performance from arbitrary code paths/machine logic than Rosetta does.

Rosetta outperforms it because of hardware assistance, not because Microsoft's implementation is bad (let alone "terrible").

[bsder]

> I am curious if this is actually from an increase in Mac sales or a decrease in PC sales and Mac has just been stable?

Once the M1 came out everybody HAD to upgrade, so Apple got a huge boost for a couple years as people cycled out their x86 stuff.

Latest data shows Apple's computer sales slumping much harder than the PC industry in general.

[frandroid]

You stopped hearing about it because the chips Qualcomm made were dreadful.

[minedwiz]

IIRC ARM64 Windows running in a VM on Mac greatly exceeded performance on native windows hardware with those qcom chips.

[fulafel]

Most gaming is on ARM (mobile) now I think. Most of the revenue too.

[seec]

From the stats I could gather I really doubt macOS market share increased substantially in usage. What I think happened is that they doubled their usual sales figures. Which is unsurprising if you look at the buildup of not-so-great hardware they release post-2015 before AS. Their machines had annoyances and were very uncompetitive with comparable offering because of soldered RAM/SSD pricing.

Then they released AS and the first round of hardware looked competitive because at least they seemed to have something different, a real advantage worth paying more. At least that was the marketing. I believe it got many to update very old hardware that was kept running because Apple offerings seemed so out of touch; then some others got interested to "complete" their iOS devices and even traditional PC users got sucked in for novelty factor or battery life argument. In practice if the second-hand market is to be looked at, many went back to other machines and the market is inundated by underpowered, overpriced, close to entry level machines (people figure out the hard way that 8GB of RAM is very tight for a post 2020 computer no matter how good your software optimisation is...).

Now the second release of AS was disappointing to say the least (pretty bad considering the price hikes) and I think many are holding to see what they can do with M3. So the sales have dropped a lot, at least as much as all other OEM if not more (especially in comparison to previous years).

So I think what they call the market share is actually the sales number, that doesn't mean much. If you account for all the hardware that got retired plus all the hardware that sit unused (waiting to be sold or else) macOS market share has been slightly slopping upward at best. Mostly stable in practice.

When you look at the sales numbers, it is almost 80% laptops. They barely sell any of what you would call a "PC". It makes sense; since laptops is the only place where AS has any advantages and it is also the only way to use your extra expensive "computer" as a status symbol. This is also what most employers are going to buy for their staff because unless you need real power where AS is almost disqualified from the get go it makes everything easier. They used to sell a lot of iMacs (especially the 27" version) because it was very convenient, but they don't have those anymore so...

If anything, macOS is becoming less relevant as a computing platform by the day and more of a luxury alternative brand. So its market is becoming less relevant by the day too. I think Apple is on the path to become to computing what Campagnolo is to cycling...

Traditional PCs are not going anywhere and for way more reasons than just upgradability (your car is not technically upgradeable but is made with components from many different competing suppliers).