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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

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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_vulnerability)#Affected_hardware 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)

SoftTalker 4y ago

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 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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_vulnerability)#Affected_hardware 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)