Will Windows PCs/laptops get a boost in sales?

[maflynn]

I think there will be a shift of people towards x86 laptops,

The more I think about it, the less I think it will be an issue for the majority of Mac users. Only those that have a desire or need to run windows. That includes folks who like to run games, or has windows running as a VM. One thing is for sure this will kill Parallels and Fusion as a product. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but the long term prospects of both Apps murky at best. At least with Fusion, Vmware will just move on, maybe decide to stop development of Fusion and cut their losses. Parallels is a one-trick pony AFAIK, and without the ability to run windows, they have a darker outlook.

Back to the point, I think most people who buy Macs, are doing so for a number of reasons, and those reasons have not gone away with this change. As long as they have their apps they need, they won't care. Its only people who want windows imo

 

[1221320]

The more I think about it, the less I think it will be an issue for the majority of Mac users. Only those that have a desire or need to run windows. That includes folks who like to run games, or has windows running as a VM. One thing is for sure this will kill Parallels and Fusion as a product. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but the long term prospects of both Apps murky at best. At least with Fusion, Vmware will just move on, maybe decide to stop development of Fusion and cut their losses. Parallels is a one-trick pony AFAIK, and without the ability to run windows, they have a darker outlook.

Back to the point, I think most people who buy Macs, are doing so for a number of reasons, and those reasons have not gone away with this change. As long as they have their apps they need, they won't care. Its only people who want windows imo

I agree. I think there will be a shift, but it's a tiny, tiny fraction of Mac users. The bigger problem is the more general user - for example, will Blizzard make an ARM version of World of Warcraft? Their Mac version has been hinky for a while now, so I would suggest not. There must be a lot of other apps and programs that will face the same situation.

Of course, if ARM Macs, with ARM-supporting GPUs, give groundbreaking performance, then the entire computer industry may start shifting over in the next decade!

 

[KPOM]

You missed my point, you don't need an ARM processor to do that. While Apple is highlighting examples of why it makes sense for them to switch to their own silicon, running iOS apps simply isn't one of them, since Apple has project Catalyst. Its immaterial as to whether its in the hands of consumers, simply because Apple doesn't have any ARM based macs yet anyways.

Catalyst isn't the same. It's a tool to make it easier to port iOS/iPadOS apps to macOS, and will continue to exist because iPad and Mac have different user interfaces. But macOS will now run all iOS/iPadOS devices directly without any developer intervention. That's significant. Plus now, all relevant macOS apps will be ported to or written directly for Apple Silicon. Once that happens, it makes something like a "MacBook Surface" possible (touchscreen device capable of running both iPadOS and macOS). We know there is demand for such a product, but as long as macOS was on a different processor architecture, it wasn't viable.
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I agree. I think there will be a shift, but it's a tiny, tiny fraction of Mac users. The bigger problem is the more general user - for example, will Blizzard make an ARM version of World of Warcraft? Their Mac version has been hinky for a while now, so I would suggest not. There must be a lot of other apps and programs that will face the same situation.

Of course, if ARM Macs, with ARM-supporting GPUs, give groundbreaking performance, then the entire computer industry may start shifting over in the next decade!

If there is an iOS version, then it is that much easier to make a macOS version.

 

[LeeW]

We all use Macs and still do some to all of our work in Windows VMs.

What do you need a Mac for then, move to Windows if you are reliant on it that much?

 

[mwptrsn]

The more I think about it, the less I think it will be an issue for the majority of Mac users. Only those that have a desire or need to run windows. That includes folks who like to run games, or has windows running as a VM. One thing is for sure this will kill Parallels and Fusion as a product. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but the long term prospects of both Apps murky at best. At least with Fusion, Vmware will just move on, maybe decide to stop development of Fusion and cut their losses. Parallels is a one-trick pony AFAIK, and without the ability to run windows, they have a darker outlook.

Back to the point, I think most people who buy Macs, are doing so for a number of reasons, and those reasons have not gone away with this change. As long as they have their apps they need, they won't care. Its only people who want windows imo

This is kind of where I stand. I don’t really buy a Mac for the OS. I buy it for the third party apps. Catalina already weeded out the software I was using that hadn’t been updated in forever, so I expect the vast majority of what I use daily to come along for the ride.

Now, the fact that iOS and iPadOS apps run on their own on macOS is actually something that gives me pause. How much shovelware are we going to see? I do think there are advantages - stuff like Slack won’t have to live as an electron app. But I’m still concerned.

I’ve already been thinking of dipping a toe out of the ecosystem - at least when it comes to the computer side. I’ve got an iPad Pro I already grab more often when I’m mobile than my laptop. So thinking of getting a PC laptop to game on.

 

[kazmac]

I continuously attempt to switch (Waiting on the latest PC laptop), as I just want to get back to creating without pause.

We’ll see what happens with the ARM transition (I am not crazy about it, given my ongoing issues with iPads/iOS). If the Mac Mini’s multiple issues are fixed, I may finally own a Mini, but need to explore other options now.

 

[Breaking Good]

I don't think there's currently any way to get the ARM version of Windows.

Windows 10 already runs on the Snapdragon 835, 850 and 8cx as part of their Always Connected PC line.

Unfortunately, most people don't know about Windows on Snapdragon because the reviewers always pan the performance. They expect the ARM chips to be able to compete head-to-head with an Intel core i5 when the vast majority of people who are using a small computer don't need that type of computing power.

My hope is that Mac moving to ARM will boost the sales of Windows on Snapdragon.

 

[ian87w]

Windows 10 already runs on the Snapdragon 835, 850 and 8cx as part of their Always Connected PC line.

Unfortunately, most people don't know about Windows on Snapdragon because the reviewers always pan the performance. They expect the ARM chips to be able to compete head-to-head with an Intel core i5 when the vast majority of people who are using a small computer don't need that type of computing power.

My hope is that Mac moving to ARM will boost the sales of Windows on Snapdragon.

The issue with Windows 10 on ARM is that Microsoft doesn't provide a way for users to purchase a retail license of it. Microsoft only offers it to PC makers. So even though they exist, there's no way for an end user to get one without purchasing an actual ARM computer with Windows 10 pre-installed.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

I didn't get the whole Linux in a VM thing. It's not like a VM is something new? What was the point of it?

Look at the WWDC audience. They are mostly programmers not Joe Consumers.

WWDC participants often have a vested interest in a computing platform that allows them to virtualize a Linux system (e.g., a dev server).

Federighi and Company mentioned specific bullet points because they were addressing an audience largely comprised of programmers.

Remember in the early days of OS X/macOS, WWDC participants often carried Linux or Windows notebook PCs. Today, almost all of them have MacBooks since it can run the unholy trinity of operating systems: macOS, Windows, and a UNIX-y OS like Linux or FreeBSD.

 

[grmlin]

I’m one of these programmers ? and I used VMs forever on Macs. I didn’t understand this part of the presentation. Maybe it was just a : look this still works; kind of thing. I’m very skeptical that current development workflows will just work though. But time will fix this for sure.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Maybe it was just a : look this still works; kind of thing.

That was my interpretation since it was just a passing matter and they did not dwell on it.

The number of Mac users who need Linux in a VM is a tiny percentage of the total Mac userbase. However WWDC is not a representative cross section of the overall Mac userbase. If they didn't address it and there was a live 20 questions Q&A session, you know this would be one of the first ones asked by a WWDC audience member.

Apple wisely terminated any speculative discussion that likely would have interrupted every single WWDC session for the remainder of that week.

 

[grmlin]

I used VMs mainly for running docker. Tons of people use it.
Now that I switched to Windows and WSL I think this has the potential to be a truly amazing development platform. A natively running Windows with alle the apps etc, and a Linux VM below it running at pretty much full speed. Having your complete work environment in a file is absolutely amazing and I hope they continue working on it to solve the remaining problems.

 

[Breaking Good]

The issue with Windows 10 on ARM is that Microsoft doesn't provide a way for users to purchase a retail license of it. Microsoft only offers it to PC makers. So even though they exist, there's no way for an end user to get one without purchasing an actual ARM computer with Windows 10 pre-installed.

Please understand that you are dealing with someone of limited computer knowledge here, but what would be the benefit of purchasing such a license without a computer?

I like would like to see more WoS devices. But what would be the benefit of building one yourself versus building an x86 device.

The primary benefit of an ARM device is that it is smaller with better battery life. Neither would be available if you are building your own device.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Please understand that you are dealing with someone of limited computer knowledge here, but what would be the benefit of purchasing such a license without a computer?

The main benefit is that the end user can choose the specific hardware combination rather than be forced to accept a given computer manufacturer's specific combination.

Windows PC gamers and enthusiasts have been building their own boxes for 30+ years which is why PC media sites and deadtrees magazines are chock full of articles about individual parts (CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, power supplies, etc.).

A couple of simple analogies would be cooking your own dinner rather than selecting an item off a fast food restaurant's menu or buying your own yarn and knitting your own sweater rather than what designer deemed is fashionable this season.

 

[Breaking Good]

The main benefit is that the end user can choose the specific hardware combination rather than be forced to accept a given computer manufacturer's specific combination.

Windows PC gamers and enthusiasts have been building their own boxes for 30+ years which is why PC media sites and deadtrees magazines are chock full of articles about individual parts (CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, power supplies, etc.).

A couple of simple analogies would be cooking your own dinner rather than selecting an item off a fast food restaurant's menu or buying your own yarn and knitting your own sweater rather than what designer deemed is fashionable this season.

Got it. Understood.

But if ARM Macs lead to more interest in ARM Windows PC's, isn't it more likely that Microsoft will start to offer ARM Windows retail licenses?

Can't a developer get a copy of an ARM Windows retail license?

Of course, I think you can also make the argument that one of the reasons for poor WoS sales is that there is no community out there experimenting with Windows on ARM in order to talk it up. If developers and enthusiasts could play around with Windows on ARM they could become an advocate for it and help drive sales.

Apple is offering a Mac mini with a ARM chip to developers. I don't think there is a comparable item offered by Qualcomm.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Got it. Understood.

But if ARM Macs lead to more interest in ARM Windows PC's, isn't it more likely that Microsoft will start to offer ARM Windows retail licenses?

To date, there has been little enthusiasm about Windows on Arm. It runs but not in a way that anyone is impressed with. The Arm Windows PC market is pretty stagnant.

Can't a developer get a copy of an ARM Windows retail license?

Of course, I think you can also make the argument that one of the reasons for poor WoS sales is that there is no community out there experimenting with Windows on ARM in order to talk it up. If developers and enthusiasts could play around with Windows on ARM they could become an advocate for it and help drive sales.

Apple is offering a Mac mini with a ARM chip to developers. I don't think there is a comparable item offered by Qualcomm.

Apple is offering the Developer Transition Kit right now because there is no other hardware that macOS for Apple Silicon can run on. Once Apple starts shipping production Macs with Apple Silicon, they will shut down the one-year DTK program. The DTK agreement specifies that the developer is supposed to return the hardware back to Apple after a year.

Because of this planned DTK expiration, it is likely that the first wave of Apple Silicon Macs will include one low-end notebook and one low-end desktop. Of course, Apple doesn't want developers writing software for pre-production hardware once actual production units are available. This is not an Apple-specific preference. Other hardware manufacturers would prefer that developers work on production machines.

Qualcomm doesn't need to offer such a thing. There is plenty of production Qualcomm Arm hardware out there.

Hell, Broadcom chips are the exclusive SoC in Raspberry Pi devices. If Microsoft really wanted to, they could sell retail Windows Arm licenses to Raspberry Pi enthusiasts.

I personally despise desktop Linux (and I first installed desktop Linux on x86 hardware in the late Nineties) but Raspbian -- at least on RPI 4 -- is a functional desktop computing environment.

 

[Brien]

If Apple are wildly successful it’s possible Windows moves to ARM too, so who knows?

 

[maflynn]

If Apple are wildly successful it’s possible Windows moves to ARM too, so who knows?

With a 10% marketshare, I don't think they'll be wildly successful to a degree that causes an entire shift of the industry.

I will say if anyone can successfully manage a platform change, its apple.

I don't see windows moving to ARM to a degree that you can say the success of apple was the cause, there's many more factors and complications with windows then macOS. For instance, you cannot run 64bit apps on the current version of ARM windows, and while MS is working to enable both native and x86 64bit bit apps, x86 device drivers will never be able to run. Apple manages all of the device drivers for macOS so that's not an Apple problem.

Another advantage is apple's silicon, MS just doesn't have access to the technology or high performance ARM processors and it shows in the way too early comparisons.

 

[Breaking Good]

Just how different is the operating system (MacOS or Windows) between ARM and x86? Would it be a heavy lift for either Apple or Microsoft to maintain code so that the operating system will run on both x86 and ARM? Is the code for each so different that you essentially have to maintain two different versions like MacOS versus iOS?

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Would it be a heavy lift for either Apple or Microsoft to maintain code so that the operating system will run on both x86 and ARM?

It is a "heavy lift" [sic]? Probably but these guys are professionals. They get paid to do this and they're supposed to be pretty good at it. This isn't something that a bunch of snot-nosed dilettantes are attempting. Sometimes in life it takes hard work to get to a better place and I'm not just talking about computing.

Anyhow that's what Apple is doing with macOS 11 Big Sur. It'll run on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. It's running on a bunch of unreleased stuff in secret labs, most of which will never make it to a store shelf.

My own personal belief is that Apple has been running OS X/macOS on Arm-powered devices in their labs since OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (way back in 2010). This isn't some goofy project they came up with six months ago while having a couple of pitchers of beer at BJ's. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2010 is the same year as Apple's first custom Arm SoC -- the Apple A4 -- and the iPad. This was also around the same timeframe when Apple moved new Mac hardware releases to full 64-bit architecture.

At that time, Snow Leopard was described by Apple as a complete under-the-hood rewrite of the operating system. It had very few new features. It was the last version of OS X that supported the original Rosetta. That was ten years after OS X's debut. Now ten years later, here we are again with a major OS rewrite, so much so they gave it a new number, macOS 11.

Three years later, Apple hit another major milestone: the A7 SoC, the first 64-bit Arm CPU widely deployed in a mobile device.

Is the code for each so different that you essentially have to maintain two different versions like MacOS versus iOS?

For sure there is plenty of low-level code that is different between macOS Intel and macOS Apple Silicon. Again, Apple has probably been handling this internally for ten years.

In the similar way, many people speculated that OS X's original delay was caused by Apple's internal mandate that OS X run on both PPC and Intel CPUs, years before Apple announced their transition to the x86 architecture.

This is not Apple's first rodeo.

 

[The_Interloper]

But if ARM Macs lead to more interest in ARM Windows PC's, isn't it more likely that Microsoft will start to offer ARM Windows retail licenses?

Can't a developer get a copy of an ARM Windows retail license?

It‘s not as simple as Windows running on generic ARM chips. The version of Windows for ARM is specifically written for Qualcomm Snapdragon - this is detailed in this week’s Windows Weekly Podcast by Paul Thurrott. He says that technically it’s “Windows for Snapdragon“.

This further scuppers the idea that WoA could ever work on Apple Silicon. He seems to think that we could go back to the days of Virtual PC software, where the likes of Parallels will only run Windows in emulation rather than a VM.

 

[maflynn]

It‘s not as simple as Windows running on generic ARM chips. The version of Windows for ARM is specifically written for Qualcomm Snapdragon - this is detailed in this week’s Windows Weekly Podcast by Paul Thurrott. He says that technically it’s “Windows for Snapdragon“.

Agreed, a lot of people miss that very important point. I saw posts in the newly created ARM forum, saying MS could just sell the ARM version of windows so Mac buyers could have access. While the underlying architecture is ARM, they are significantly different.

 

[pshufd]

The more I think about it, the less I think it will be an issue for the majority of Mac users. Only those that have a desire or need to run windows. That includes folks who like to run games, or has windows running as a VM. One thing is for sure this will kill Parallels and Fusion as a product. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but the long term prospects of both Apps murky at best. At least with Fusion, Vmware will just move on, maybe decide to stop development of Fusion and cut their losses. Parallels is a one-trick pony AFAIK, and without the ability to run windows, they have a darker outlook.

Back to the point, I think most people who buy Macs, are doing so for a number of reasons, and those reasons have not gone away with this change. As long as they have their apps they need, they won't care. Its only people who want windows imo

I can go Windows or macOS. In the past, I had to have Windows but the number of programs I needed on Windows eventually dropped to zero. macOS had critical mass for me several years ago. Apple hardware isn't that great for gaming as it is and many may already have a dual setup.

 

[ian87w]

It‘s not as simple as Windows running on generic ARM chips. The version of Windows for ARM is specifically written for Qualcomm Snapdragon - this is detailed in this week’s Windows Weekly Podcast by Paul Thurrott. He says that technically it’s “Windows for Snapdragon“.

This further scuppers the idea that WoA could ever work on Apple Silicon. He seems to think that we could go back to the days of Virtual PC software, where the likes of Parallels will only run Windows in emulation rather than a VM.

That's interesting and good to know.

I do have high hopes for Microsoft under Satya. Considering they have MS Office running on Apple silicon (while their own MS Office for the Surface Pro X is just an emulated 32-bit x86 version) does say something about this new Microsoft.

 

[The_Interloper]

Considering they have MS Office running on Apple silicon (while their own MS Office for the Surface Pro X is just an emulated 32-bit x86 version) does say something about this new Microsoft.

They basically want their services (Office, OneDrive, Teams, Azure etc) to be everywhere - Mac, PC, iOS, Android. What they care less about these days is Windows itself; it'll never go away, of course, but next time you watch a keynote from Microsoft, check how many times they even mention Windows. It's virtually never.

The platform doesn't matter now, only the services. Putting Windows on Apple Silicon would take a huge commitment from MS - it would effectively be a completely new OS - which makes the likelihood of Windows on future ARM Macs very unlikely. Office on Apple Silicon, however, is an immediate priority.