Hacker News Reader

Comment by mister_hn | Hacker News Reader

With just less than 10% of market share, do you really think it will change the whole thing? Unless Microsoft pushes for ARM too, I don't see any changes soon

View on HN

We'll have to see. As another person already pointed out, VMWare has experimented with ESXi on ARM and they claim their customers could realize significant cost savings by migrating to ARM [1]. So if they've already done a good amount of engineering work on it, we may well see VMWare Fusion on ARM that can efficiently run ARM guests. They plan on releasing a tech preview in July [2].

Whether you can stick an emulated x86-64 CPU in there is another matter. It's a much bigger engineering lift and unless Apple puts some resources into it it's not clear to me a virtualization company by themselves would want to incur the cost. I hope there is enough demand for it and that someone will provide it. For me personally the only reason I run VMWare Fusion is to access x86-only Windows applications for which there is no replacement.

[1] https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/10/esxi-on-arm-at-the-....

[2] https://twitter.com/VMwareFusion/status/1275466832002945024

Microsoft has been dabbling with ARM for a long time now.

It will all come down to whether this move gives Apple a significant performance and/or battery life advantage. If Apple pulls it off it will force Microsoft and other vendors to respond.

They announced there will be no Bootcamp, I hope there will be a possibility to install other OSes as well on their new machines.

This is critical especially when they make their older devices "EOL" and there are no more OS updates.

VMWare and Paralells have both said they will have support. I don’t know what that means, yet.

I would not personally buy a Mac product for the next 2-3 years.

Microsoft just announced their own OpenJDK variant for Windows ARM.

if Microsoft ports the whole business applications to ARM, there might be hope, but without them, It's hard

Office for ARM will be supported on Windows 10X, already exists for tablets and phones, Apple also demoed the beta for ARM Mac at WWDC keynote.

also SharePoint, Projects, Dynamics?

SharePoint, Dynamics run on whatever .NET runs, and that includes ARM CPUs.

Project is part of Office.

In any case I though we were talking about consumer devices here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com