Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

It’s good this exists, but I don’t know how Windows ever gets past the chicken and egg problem.

If you don’t care about Windows software, Chromebooks are popular and cheap. They don’t have much in the way of security issues, don’t need much management, and store your setup in the cloud.

If you care about the software you probably don’t want ARM. The translation layer is supposed to be quite noticeable unlike Rosetta 1 & 2 on Macs.

And PCs no longer start at $750 so ARM can’t undercut by much. I’ve seen sub-$200 PC laptops. Sure they’re garbage but PCs are at basically every price point now.

Apple had it easy. “Our processors are way better than our old ones, we’re doing this, enjoy or leave.”

MS doesn’t have the kind of position to force this. So why would the market move?

Microsoft doesn't want to be beholden to the Intel-AMD duopoly. By threatening them with ARM Windows, they force Intel and AMD to improve their low power offerings and to lower prices, even if ARM Windows never sees mass market adoption

In the laptop world Apple is so far ahead it's unbelievable. My wife just bought an M1 MBA for like $900 and there's really nothing in the PC market that can beat that in terms of value.

If Apple released a cheap M1 laptop for like $500 it would be game over for laptop PCs and probably would make a huge dent in the Chromebook market.

Chromebooks are only popular on US school system, and bloodly expensive for what is a Chrome jungling OS constrained by what Web APIs are able to expose from modern computer hardware.

Yeah, when Windows moves to ARM they lose all their legacy software support, which is legitimately the one of only reasons people use Windows in the first place.

While I doubt ARM port will go anywhere (RISC-V is where it's at), they have x86 emulation support in place, to run legacy binaries.

Windows ARM64 runs x86 binaries pretty well.

Well enough that it doesn't matter that much you don't have a native Google Chrome, for instance. AMD64/x86-64 version runs just fine.

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