Read up on this thread with the Surface X and you can see some of the issues.
Basic Surface X issues:
(a) Price - but then the MS Surface range
is the only line of computers known to humankind priced to make Apple kit look like the economy option. Of course, MS makes most of its money from
other people's computers and I think they've always seen their own hardware as a sort of 'reference platform' for Windows as much as a viable consumer product. Of course, the high price leads to unrealistic expectations - the surface X is MacBook Air performance at MacBook Pro prices.
(b) Sounds like MS have stuffed up battery life. That could be a form-over-function mistake - using ARM's power consumption edge to make things smaller and lighter by shrinking the battery rather than extending battery life.
(c) App compatibility. Microsoft have stuffed up on ARM-native application availability - the Surface X
really isn't ready for the big time if (
as the Verge review suggests) its relying on emulation for Office and Chrome (including the forthcoming Chromium/Edge). Chrom(ium) is already available for ARM64 Linux and it sounds like its ready for ARM Windows but for some
political spat between Google and MS.
x86 emulation on Windows sounds like its 32-bit only - but that kinda makes sense for Windows, which has a far bigger issue with legacy "abandonware" than Apple (including vast amounts of in-house corporate software) most of which will be 32-bit. Also, thanks to the Windows "legacy" that emulation layer is probably there for the ages - not a transitional solution that can be dumped after a couple of years (like 68K and PPC emulation on the Mac). ISTR there may be IP issues over x86 emulation, as opposed to some technical limitation of ARM, which could be a problem for Apple.
Apple have two jobs to do if they decide to go ARM:
(1) Get the form/function balance right when "spending" the ARM power dividend. Oh dear.
(2)
don't stuff up on ARM-native application availability. It would make sense to launch a "public" developer system for 6 months or so before the first consumer product (as they did with Intel), because you really
don't want reviewers commenting on the system on day zero when
everything is emulated. (If Apple aren't already working under NDA with key developers like Adobe and MS then forget the whole thing).
Its important to remember that
Apple isn't Microsoft/Wintel - Apple have successfully made a series of seismic platform changes: 6502/Apple II OS to 68k/MacOS classic, 68k to PPC, Classic MacOS to Unix/OS X, PPC to Intel, 32 to 16 bit, each time with thetransition done and dusted in a few years. In the same time, MS/Windows has been a
very slow evolution from DOS to Win3/9x (still with 16-bit DOS at their core) to the modern 32/64-bit Windows NT-descended OS, always clinging to backwards compatibility, always x86-based (WinNT
was briefly supported on other CPUs but these were quickly abandoned).
The Surface X is MS's
second attempt at Windows on ARM. (Windows RT sank without trace). I'm not sure if anybody (from MS down, through all those Windows app developers to corporate users) really thinks it will succeed - partly because MS simply cannot abandon the legacy x86 market in the foreseeable future (they're barely succeeding in stamping out Windows XP or even 16-bit) and also because their actual
hardware division is relatively small beer, even compared to Apple (who are usually ~ #4 behind Lenovo, HP and Dell
on a list in which MS doesn't even show up). So developers are hardly going to rush in to porting their Windows apps to ARM.
On the other hand, when Jobs stood up in 2005 and said they'd be completely switching from PPC to Intel by the end of 2007, they were
done by mid-2006 and PPC support was dumped from MacOS by mid 2009. So if Tim Cook stands up next June and says that Apple will be completely transitioning to ARM by 2022 then you'd better believe it - and all Apple developers will know that they are on notice to fix their software.
That isn't because Apple is 123% more magical than Microsoft - its that the customer and developer base is different and Apple always has been prepared and able to tell them that they're going to change.
