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Apple has to significantly invest to continue with Bootcamp, only to offer people Windows on ARM. Windows on ARM is actually a great product, but it's not what
by DCKing 6y ago
Apple has to significantly invest to continue with Bootcamp, only to offer people Windows on ARM. Windows on ARM is actually a great product, but it's not what people use Bootcamp for. There's no value add here for Apple, and I simply can't see them doing it. Not even if they continue using AMD graphics in (some of) their machines. It's not worth any effort to run a platform that is still as niche as Windows on ARM.
The only way I see this happening if someone else would do the work. And that someone else would have to be Microsoft. Why? They're the only ones with an incentive to do it. ARM Macs would be a highly available, highly performant development platform for Windows on ARM. Apple could be accidentally solving a supply problem here for Microsoft - a supply of quality high performance ARM desktop hardware. Apple might even be inclined to work with Microsoft (or they might not), but even if unlikely the only way I see this play out is without Apple paying for any of the work.
- amq 6y agoI wouldn't call Windows on ARM a niche product, since it supports x86 emulation, enabling, arguably, most of the use cases.
- saagarjha 6y agoPart of them. If you just want to use one-off old software then emulation is adequate. If you actually care about performance, then no, not really.
- DCKing 6y agoI don't mean to speak against Windows on ARM viability - it's a necessary product and it's well executed. But Windows on ARM is still building a market, and can't run significant high performance software yet. Even for gaming it can't run anything released in the last 15 years in the current Snapdragons, which by itself excludes a really big portion of Bootcamp use cases.
- m463 6y agoI used bootcamp for years to run real games at real speeds (windows+steam) it was pretty much: mac workhorse by day, windows game machine by night all that's fading away.