Win8 was a disaster. Hard to understand what Steven is even saying or his point about the Macbook Neo.

The Neo is enabled by the increasing capability of the phone chips and the pre-existing completed move to ARM for MacOS that happened over a 5 year span. Critically the entire app ecosystem quickly embraced the new architecture and there were some nice fallbacks for legacy apps. The sheer scale of the phone chips allows them to be priced to where the Neo becomes doable, especially when using the previous generation of chip.

Windows 8 and Surface RT had no such advantages. Windows was always going to stay primarily an x86 operating system at the time those products hit. There was no obvious chip that had a scale of the iPhone chips. Windows RT was without many apps (chicken/egg problem).

In his entire screed he never realizes the reason Apple got their transition to work was they genuinely worked hard to make it happen on both ends: they forced developers hard AND still shipped Rosetta 2 to make it seamless for user anxiety for laggard developers. They even had this playbook watching Apple do their first transition from PowerPC to x86. Yet he seems to think Windows 8’s problem was velocity.

Microsoft never forced developers to jump onto Arm the way Apple did.

That’s a key part in why Windows Arm is such a substandard experience.

The Windows executive in this article sounds delusional. He talks about how if the Surface Product line actually had footing, we’d eventually see Arm bases desktops under the Windows umbrella.

The Surface failed because Windows just isn’t cool. No one consciously buys a Windows PC. It’s either to play games or do work.

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