MSFT seems to be going all in on the PC form factor.
The world has changed around MSFT and its finding that there are more and more out there who get by entirely on tablets, and I’d imagine the great majority of such users, at least those who once used a Laptop, are getting by entirely on a tablet called iPad.
That’s my story; I was in the software game for 26 years, designing software and building software companies. These days, and for the last two years, I drag my aging MacBook Air out of the closet only to run TurboTax Premier one day each year. The other 364 days I manage my 7-figure self-directed stock and options portfolio entirely from my iPad and iPhone. Most of my friends don’t even realize I own a laptop computer.
So MSFT builds hybrids, which are more Laptop than tablet, and now laptops with longer battery life and perhaps a few ounces lighter. Okay, sure... there’s still a market for such out there, and I’m sure they’ll hold back the tides for a few more years with this strategy. While Apple consolidates iOS as the standard platform for a new more mobile world. (see GE and Apple Form Deep Partnership).
While the world has changed, for the next 5 years, MSFT will still be marketing to sell into 500 corporate million legacy seats using the Apple model (owning the HW and the SW0, and letting ASUS and DeLL and Lenovo spiral to the bottom competing, against M$ bundling HW and seat licenses to Azure AD Premium.
This will buy them another 10 years (MSFT's goal... get all Fortune 500 customers to migrate to Azure/AD (which at $2-$11 per head per month... that's printing high margin profit). The microsoft gets out of the HW business all together. They are just a cloud service, and the "MicroSoft Tax" will be imposed on every person a company requires to access their data, no matter what the device.
Apple's end game is to define the experience. MSFT's end game is to charge everyone for the privilege of logging in.
I think Apple is simply working on creating an A-Series based Mac mini running macOS on their own chips.
Why assume it'll be an A-series chip when we've seen Apple using their ARM-based designs to make all sorts of chip categories? I'd lean toward Apple creating an entirely new chip designation that would offer a lot more RAM, better GPUs, and other features needed for a desktop OS.
I think you're both right.
Apple has probably several Mac's running on ASeries based chips now. To help design the chipset that ships with the first production ARM mac.
As iOS matures and becomes more sophisticated with each iteration, while at the same time becoming functionally closer to macOS, does it really make sense to port macOS to ARM for inclusion in a new MacBook of some description in order to kick out Intel? Or, perhaps does it make more sense to extend the 1B+ user base of iOS to offer them a different and new form factor where all their existing (and already purchased) apps will continue to work, where the OS is *already optimised* for ARM chips, where users understand the OS paradigm and are happily using it daily and now can simply switch to using it in a new device?
Doesn't it make more sense going that way instead of the head-ache and hassle of porting over macOS (and getting app devs once *again, again* to port all their apps, for what, a dwindling market opportunity?) and whereby potentially pissing off Intel, the developer community and potentially losing a whole base of users that rely on Intel-based machines? Why bifurcate the macOS world when you can simply extend your existing iOS world while keeping the world of Intel-macOS niche, intact and chugging along nicely until the other world (of ARM-iOS) simply takes over completely?
For this to really matter you need full MS Office compatibility including Excel macros or many businesses still couldn't switch to ARM.
And yet iDevices not only thrive in businesses, but in the enterprise. Apparently your assertion of "need" isn't as absolute as you make it out to be. You've also excluded the most common customer base for the Mac in your statement.
/shrug
Whatever you want to believe. Right now many business processes are written as excel macros too believe that many big companies will quickly change over for the common business user that doesn't generally need as much computational power. So windows on arm doesn't matter unless it supports all legacy use cases or you might as well get a cheaper iPad.
The funy thing about this is neither Samsung or Qualcomm make more powerful versions of their ARM processors for things like tablet. They are already way behind the A11. If Apple makes an ARM MacBook (with the likely A11X or A12X) it’s going to be far more powerful than any Windows laptop using ARM.
Why give this an 'A' designation at all? Why can't they have a D1 (like they've done with their other ARM designs) that has a lot more transistors, higher clock rate, more RAM, and much higher thermals than the A-series while still being well below what Intel offers for the current MacBook Air? There are also plenty of features that could be added to support a desktop environment like direct x86_64 virtualization or a discrete GPU.
The designation is irrelevant.
That's probably the dumbest thing I've read on this forum… ever. The designation is relevant because Apple choose for it to be relevant. It's why the A-series isn't the same designation as the W-series, T-Series, or S-series, and why the X in the A-series chips refers to something over the A-series chips without that designation. This is not up for debate!
Nothing like taking my comments completely out of context.
I’m not talking about designations - I’m talking about Apples processor design team being far ahead of everyone else. Whatever they call it (“if” they make it) there won’t be anything from Qualcomm or Samsung that could hope to compete. They can’t even compete with Apples current A-Series processors, let alone any future processor Apple might make, regardless of what they decide to call it.
Clear now?
In the past, and I may be taking this out of context, he has stated he was less interested in the information (aka facts) than the discussion. Since then I've stopped caring about his opinion except to make fun of it every now and then.
For this to really matter you need full MS Office compatibility including Excel macros or many businesses still couldn't switch to ARM.
And yet iDevices not only thrive in businesses, but in the enterprise. Apparently your assertion of "need" isn't as absolute as you make it out to be. You've also excluded the most common customer base for the Mac in your statement.
/shrug
Whatever you want to believe. Right now many business processes are written as excel macros too believe that many big companies will quickly change over for the common business user that doesn't generally need as much computational power. So windows on arm doesn't matter unless it supports all legacy use cases or you might as well get a cheaper iPad.
I believe that facts. Apple doesn't build the Mac around the Enterprise and certainly not around Excel macros, and even if they did it has no bearing on inserting a low-end Mac into the lineup. The head scratcher is why you believe that the MacBook Pro or iMac would stop working with Excel because Apple brings out a Retina MacBook Air that runs on ARM.
The funy thing about this is neither Samsung or Qualcomm make more powerful versions of their ARM processors for things like tablet. They are already way behind the A11. If Apple makes an ARM MacBook (with the likely A11X or A12X) it’s going to be far more powerful than any Windows laptop using ARM.
Why give this an 'A' designation at all? Why can't they have a D1 (like they've done with their other ARM designs) that has a lot more transistors, higher clock rate, more RAM, and much higher thermals than the A-series while still being well below what Intel offers for the current MacBook Air? There are also plenty of features that could be added to support a desktop environment like direct x86_64 virtualization or a discrete GPU.
The designation is irrelevant.
That's probably the dumbest thing I've read on this forum… ever. The designation is relevant because Apple choose for it to be relevant. It's why the A-series isn't the same designation as the W-series, T-Series, or S-series, and why the X in the A-series chips refers to something over the A-series chips without that designation. This is not up for debate!
Nothing like taking my comments completely out of context.
I’m not talking about designations - I’m talking about Apples processor design team being far ahead of everyone else. Whatever they call it (“if” they make it) there won’t be anything from Qualcomm or Samsung that could hope to compete. They can’t even compete with Apples current A-Series processors, let alone any future processor Apple might make, regardless of what they decide to call it.
Clear now?
You mentioned a nonexistent "A11X," not me. Why talk about an A11X being used in a Mac if you don't think that an A11X will be used in a Mac? Why not refer to it as an "ARM-based Mac"?
PS: In case people have forgotten—although I'm not sure how that's possible—Apple already uses an Apple designed ARM chip in their MacBook Pros that runs a version of OS X forked on watchOS that was forked from iOS.
For this to really matter you need full MS Office compatibility including Excel macros or many businesses still couldn't switch to ARM.
And yet iDevices not only thrive in businesses, but in the enterprise. Apparently your assertion of "need" isn't as absolute as you make it out to be. You've also excluded the most common customer base for the Mac in your statement.
/shrug
Whatever you want to believe. Right now many business processes are written as excel macros too believe that many big companies will quickly change over for the common business user that doesn't generally need as much computational power. So windows on arm doesn't matter unless it supports all legacy use cases or you might as well get a cheaper iPad.
I believe that facts. Apple doesn't build the Mac around the Enterprise and certainly not around Excel macros, and even if they did it has no bearing on inserting a low-end Mac into the lineup. The head scratcher is why you believe that the MacBook Pro or iMac would stop working with Excel because Apple brings out a Retina MacBook Air that runs on ARM.
I'm sorry you are scratching your head because of poor reading comprehension and would prefer to argue a strawman.
The article is about MS releasing an ARM based laptop.
My response is it doesn't matter to many businesses unless they also include full compatibility with the x86 Office suite. The windows market is heavily dependent on the business market, far more than MacOS or iOS.
Why you would prefer to argue about iOS in the enterprise or about an ARM based Mac is simply just you arguing for the sake of arguing.
The "fact" is that full windows compatibility IS important to enterprise user and is experienced by many enterprise Mac users because MacOS Office doesn't fully support all the features of Windows Office and lacks other business apps (MS Project, Visio, etc) so we get those features using Parallels or Fusion. Likewise Office 365 doesn't fully support excel macros and all the costing and earned value spreadsheets don't work. It recently (this year) got Visio.
Which is why Dell and HP still sells a lot of traditional windows machines to enterprise.
But carry on about ARM based Macs. You've been saying these are inevitdable for years now. Eventually, you might even be right but currently your track record isn't as good as a broken clock.
For this to really matter you need full MS Office compatibility including Excel macros or many businesses still couldn't switch to ARM.
And yet iDevices not only thrive in businesses, but in the enterprise. Apparently your assertion of "need" isn't as absolute as you make it out to be. You've also excluded the most common customer base for the Mac in your statement.
/shrug
Whatever you want to believe. Right now many business processes are written as excel macros too believe that many big companies will quickly change over for the common business user that doesn't generally need as much computational power. So windows on arm doesn't matter unless it supports all legacy use cases or you might as well get a cheaper iPad.
I believe that facts. Apple doesn't build the Mac around the Enterprise and certainly not around Excel macros, and even if they did it has no bearing on inserting a low-end Mac into the lineup. The head scratcher is why you believe that the MacBook Pro or iMac would stop working with Excel because Apple brings out a Retina MacBook Air that runs on ARM.
I'm sorry you are scratching your head because of poor reading comprehension and would prefer to argue a strawman.
The article is about MS releasing an ARM based laptop.
My response is it doesn't matter to many businesses unless they also include full compatibility with the x86 Office suite. The windows market is heavily dependent on the business market, far more than MacOS or iOS.
Why you would prefer to argue about iOS in the enterprise or about an ARM based Mac is simply just you arguing for the sake of arguing.
The "fact" is that full windows compatibility IS important to enterprise user and is experienced by many enterprise Mac users because MacOS Office doesn't fully support all the features of Windows Office and lacks other business apps (MS Project, Visio, etc) so we get those features using Parallels or Fusion. Likewise Office 365 doesn't fully support excel macros and all the costing and earned value spreadsheets don't work. It recently (this year) got Visio.
Which is why Dell and HP still sells a lot of traditional windows machines to enterprise.
But carry on about ARM based Macs. You've been saying these are inevitdable for years now. Eventually, you might even be right but currently your track record isn't as good as a broken clock.
1) Mea cupla. Ah, you are referring to the original topic about MS, and not a response to my comment, which is just above yours. The lack of quoting a relevant statement made that ambiguous in the thread.
2) Clearly MS sees this as potential path if their investing in it, and it's not like the issues with Intel's future don't affect Windows and MS has already released Windows RT so this is highly feasible—with full support for Excel with Macros—in the future.
For this to really matter you need full MS Office compatibility including Excel macros or many businesses still couldn't switch to ARM.
And yet iDevices not only thrive in businesses, but in the enterprise. Apparently your assertion of "need" isn't as absolute as you make it out to be. You've also excluded the most common customer base for the Mac in your statement.
/shrug
Whatever you want to believe. Right now many business processes are written as excel macros too believe that many big companies will quickly change over for the common business user that doesn't generally need as much computational power. So windows on arm doesn't matter unless it supports all legacy use cases or you might as well get a cheaper iPad.
I believe that facts. Apple doesn't build the Mac around the Enterprise and certainly not around Excel macros, and even if they did it has no bearing on inserting a low-end Mac into the lineup. The head scratcher is why you believe that the MacBook Pro or iMac would stop working with Excel because Apple brings out a Retina MacBook Air that runs on ARM.
I'm sorry you are scratching your head because of poor reading comprehension and would prefer to argue a strawman.
The article is about MS releasing an ARM based laptop.
My response is it doesn't matter to many businesses unless they also include full compatibility with the x86 Office suite. The windows market is heavily dependent on the business market, far more than MacOS or iOS.
Why you would prefer to argue about iOS in the enterprise or about an ARM based Mac is simply just you arguing for the sake of arguing.
The "fact" is that full windows compatibility IS important to enterprise user and is experienced by many enterprise Mac users because MacOS Office doesn't fully support all the features of Windows Office and lacks other business apps (MS Project, Visio, etc) so we get those features using Parallels or Fusion. Likewise Office 365 doesn't fully support excel macros and all the costing and earned value spreadsheets don't work. It recently (this year) got Visio.
Which is why Dell and HP still sells a lot of traditional windows machines to enterprise.
But carry on about ARM based Macs. You've been saying these are inevitdable for years now. Eventually, you might even be right but currently your track record isn't as good as a broken clock.
1) Mea cupla. Ah, you are referring to the original topic about MS, and not a response to my comment, which is just above yours. The lack of quoting a relevant statement made that ambiguous in the thread.
2) Clearly MS sees this as potential path if their investing in it, and it's not like the issues with Intel's future don't affect Windows and MS has already released Windows RT so this is highly feasible—with full support for Excel with Macros—in the future.
I think that Windows RT shows that while technically feasible it is unlikely that Windows RT Take 2 is likely to be very successful unless they make a significant effort to at least port all of their own apps over.
If they do that, then it would have more traction and greater chance of success.
For this to really matter you need full MS Office compatibility including Excel macros or many businesses still couldn't switch to ARM.
And yet iDevices not only thrive in businesses, but in the enterprise. Apparently your assertion of "need" isn't as absolute as you make it out to be. You've also excluded the most common customer base for the Mac in your statement.
/shrug
Whatever you want to believe. Right now many business processes are written as excel macros too believe that many big companies will quickly change over for the common business user that doesn't generally need as much computational power. So windows on arm doesn't matter unless it supports all legacy use cases or you might as well get a cheaper iPad.
I believe that facts. Apple doesn't build the Mac around the Enterprise and certainly not around Excel macros, and even if they did it has no bearing on inserting a low-end Mac into the lineup. The head scratcher is why you believe that the MacBook Pro or iMac would stop working with Excel because Apple brings out a Retina MacBook Air that runs on ARM.
I'm sorry you are scratching your head because of poor reading comprehension and would prefer to argue a strawman.
The article is about MS releasing an ARM based laptop.
My response is it doesn't matter to many businesses unless they also include full compatibility with the x86 Office suite. The windows market is heavily dependent on the business market, far more than MacOS or iOS.
Why you would prefer to argue about iOS in the enterprise or about an ARM based Mac is simply just you arguing for the sake of arguing.
The "fact" is that full windows compatibility IS important to enterprise user and is experienced by many enterprise Mac users because MacOS Office doesn't fully support all the features of Windows Office and lacks other business apps (MS Project, Visio, etc) so we get those features using Parallels or Fusion. Likewise Office 365 doesn't fully support excel macros and all the costing and earned value spreadsheets don't work. It recently (this year) got Visio.
Which is why Dell and HP still sells a lot of traditional windows machines to enterprise.
But carry on about ARM based Macs. You've been saying these are inevitdable for years now. Eventually, you might even be right but currently your track record isn't as good as a broken clock.
1) Mea cupla. Ah, you are referring to the original topic about MS, and not a response to my comment, which is just above yours. The lack of quoting a relevant statement made that ambiguous in the thread.
2) Clearly MS sees this as potential path if their investing in it, and it's not like the issues with Intel's future don't affect Windows and MS has already released Windows RT so this is highly feasible—with full support for Excel with Macros—in the future.
I think that Windows RT shows that while technically feasible it is unlikely that Windows RT Take 2 is likely to be very successful unless they make a significant effort to at least port all of their own apps over.
If they do that, then it would have more traction and greater chance of success.
To start, I'd like to see both MS and Apple come in at the low-end of the market the way Chrome OS has done.
One point I raised on another thread a few weeks ago (on the similar ARM-based Mac topic), was about Thunderbolt licensing. This is just about to be addressed, where a vendor other than Intel would be able to develop the technology to include in their own chips. This is no doubt one of the items that Apple has been waiting for.
One point I raised on another thread a few weeks ago (on the similar ARM-based Mac topic), was about Thunderbolt licensing. This is just about to be addressed, where a vendor other than Intel would be able to develop the technology to include in their own chips. This is no doubt one of the items that Apple has been waiting for.
On a low-end Mac I don't think TB is a necessity so long as there's USB-C/3.1 and possibly mDP/DP1.2, but that would certainly make things a whole lot easier for Apple. Could they even build TB support into their SoC?
PS: The only problem with USB-C has been TB. I can't recall how backwards compatibility with devices and cables work with TB over USB-C.
The "will or won't" Apple go down the path of an ARM-based Mac is of course the key question.
There is no doubt that they can (s/w compatibility issues can be overcome in time, and most addressed well enough at the beginning). In fact, it isn't a stretch of the imagination to believe that Apple could make a kick-ass computer line based on their own silicon. While it could reduce the costs of such a computer (likely taking $100+ Intel BOM cost out), Apple would only consider it with functional benefits. Look at what Apple is doing with iPhone by adding custom blocks to the silicon, and envision this for the Mac - bringing FaceID, photo & video processing, AR & VR rendering, ML, an LTE comm stack if they can get the Qualcomm licensing issue addressed. Lots of dreamy things possible when you control the h/w, software and the silicon.
But the other side of the debate is Apple wanting to put their majority focus on the ever smaller & personal side of computing (wearables, mobile, health, etc). So they can keep & update the Mac with Intel, keep about the same sales level as today (maybe grow a little bit), and the Mac remains healthy with new OS and incremental h/w improvements.
I hope Apple goes down path A, but it isn't hard to see them decide on Path B.
If Microsoft sees a need to move windows and office over to the ARM, it’s a very strong indicator that they don’t believe that Intel’s platform will remain competitive over the long term. It’s a testament to Apple’s prowess in building a low power chip that is performance competitive with the low end portable i7 chip. Within a generation or two, Apple will outperform nearly everything Intel builds except for their data center chips. Intel’s GPUs are very poor performing and Apple’s GPUs outperform them handily.
Microsoft’s inability to move off of x86 has been a tremendous problem. Apple, Samsung and Google are driving an alternative chip architecture that is now moving much faster than Intel’s. Microsoft has to move or risk becoming irrelevant.
The problem is that the Qualcomm chip isn’t a great performer. Samsung’s Exynos chips perform at the same level while returning much better battery life. At the wearable level, Samsung’s Exynos 7270 far exceeds the Snapdragon wear 2100.
So Microsoft has tied itself to a chip manufacturer that trails Apple by a very substantial margin, even trails Samsung and must support legacy code. Microsoft could rewrite Office as a cross platform application, but that will never happen. Have people forgotten what happened when Apple rewrote Pages and Keynote to be cross platform applications and in the process dropped legacy support?!? Office is orders of magnitude more important to the business market than Apple’s suite ever was. The outcry would be enormous.
Hence Microsoft is forced to support legacy code on a chip by the least capable of the high end chip manufacturers. It’s why it would be absolutely imperative for Microsoft to obtain support for an Intel built x86 chip/emulator to accompany the Snapdragon 835. Otherwise performance would be terrible. And the migration over to ARM would stall once again as it did with Windows RT. However, Microsoft would continue to remain utterly dependent on Intel, adding cost and complexity to their machines which would still run much slower than the Apple built equivalents.
Microsoft would actually be better off working closely with Intel, investing in advancing the x86 architecture and ensuring it remains competitive, performance-wise, with ARM. It makes far more sense than trying to migrate to a new architecture and forced to support legacy code. Intel itself is totally committed to x86. And Microsoft will be forced to support the x86 platform for many years anyway. It would be better to stay on x86 where there is no additional baggage to support as office runs on it natively. The best outcome for Microsoft would be to see Intel become power competitive with ARM while staying on par in terms of performance. That’s a far more realistic scenario than for Qualcomm to become competitive with Apple, Intel and Samsung in CPU design and manufacturing.
With that in mind, Microsoft’s attempted move to ARM is astounding. They must really see Intel as being incompetent. While Intel will struggle against Apple and perhaps even Samsung, I actually see them as a far more capable CPU design and manufacturing company than Qualcomm.
I expect this to fail. I know personally, I would rather have a Surface machine with an Intel chip. It may not offer the same battery life, but compatibility is guaranteed with a robustness that I just don’t see happening with an ARM based machine. In fact, I would rather have a MacBook Pro running Windows on Fusion for Office support than a Microsoft machine running on an ARM chip supporting Office in emulation. The Microsoft machine will command a premium price and will lack technologies like thunderbolt connectivity. And who knows whether the developers at duet display will support the new Microsoft machine in allowing me to connect my iPad Pro as an external monitor. Supposedly it shouldn’t be an issues as the Qualcomm/MS device should support x86 fully. I doubt that such will be the case. And what about all of the hardware drivers in existence out there?
No thanks. I believe most of the market will feel the same way.
Comments
While the world has changed, for the next 5 years, MSFT will still be marketing to sell into 500 corporate million legacy seats using the Apple model (owning the HW and the SW0, and letting ASUS and DeLL and Lenovo spiral to the bottom competing, against M$ bundling HW and seat licenses to Azure AD Premium.
This will buy them another 10 years (MSFT's goal... get all Fortune 500 customers to migrate to Azure/AD (which at $2-$11 per head per month... that's printing high margin profit). The microsoft gets out of the HW business all together. They are just a cloud service, and the "MicroSoft Tax" will be imposed on every person a company requires to access their data, no matter what the device.
Apple's end game is to define the experience. MSFT's end game is to charge everyone for the privilege of logging in.
I think you're both right.
Apple has probably several Mac's running on ASeries based chips now. To help design the chipset that ships with the first production ARM mac.
Doesn't it make more sense going that way instead of the head-ache and hassle of porting over macOS (and getting app devs once *again, again* to port all their apps, for what, a dwindling market opportunity?) and whereby potentially pissing off Intel, the developer community and potentially losing a whole base of users that rely on Intel-based machines? Why bifurcate the macOS world when you can simply extend your existing iOS world while keeping the world of Intel-macOS niche, intact and chugging along nicely until the other world (of ARM-iOS) simply takes over completely?
Whatever you want to believe. Right now many business processes are written as excel macros too believe that many big companies will quickly change over for the common business user that doesn't generally need as much computational power. So windows on arm doesn't matter unless it supports all legacy use cases or you might as well get a cheaper iPad.
In the past, and I may be taking this out of context, he has stated he was less interested in the information (aka facts) than the discussion. Since then I've stopped caring about his opinion except to make fun of it every now and then.
PS: In case people have forgotten—although I'm not sure how that's possible—Apple already uses an Apple designed ARM chip in their MacBook Pros that runs a version of OS X forked on watchOS that was forked from iOS.
The article is about MS releasing an ARM based laptop.
My response is it doesn't matter to many businesses unless they also include full compatibility with the x86 Office suite. The windows market is heavily dependent on the business market, far more than MacOS or iOS.
Why you would prefer to argue about iOS in the enterprise or about an ARM based Mac is simply just you arguing for the sake of arguing.
The "fact" is that full windows compatibility IS important to enterprise user and is experienced by many enterprise Mac users because MacOS Office doesn't fully support all the features of Windows Office and lacks other business apps (MS Project, Visio, etc) so we get those features using Parallels or Fusion. Likewise Office 365 doesn't fully support excel macros and all the costing and earned value spreadsheets don't work. It recently (this year) got Visio.
Which is why Dell and HP still sells a lot of traditional windows machines to enterprise.
But carry on about ARM based Macs. You've been saying these are inevitdable for years now. Eventually, you might even be right but currently your track record isn't as good as a broken clock.
2) Clearly MS sees this as potential path if their investing in it, and it's not like the issues with Intel's future don't affect Windows and MS has already released Windows RT so this is highly feasible—with full support for Excel with Macros—in the future.
If they do that, then it would have more traction and greater chance of success.
PS: The only problem with USB-C has been TB. I can't recall how backwards compatibility with devices and cables work with TB over USB-C.
There is no doubt that they can (s/w compatibility issues can be overcome in time, and most addressed well enough at the beginning). In fact, it isn't a stretch of the imagination to believe that Apple could make a kick-ass computer line based on their own silicon. While it could reduce the costs of such a computer (likely taking $100+ Intel BOM cost out), Apple would only consider it with functional benefits. Look at what Apple is doing with iPhone by adding custom blocks to the silicon, and envision this for the Mac - bringing FaceID, photo & video processing, AR & VR rendering, ML, an LTE comm stack if they can get the Qualcomm licensing issue addressed. Lots of dreamy things possible when you control the h/w, software and the silicon.
But the other side of the debate is Apple wanting to put their majority focus on the ever smaller & personal side of computing (wearables, mobile, health, etc). So they can keep & update the Mac with Intel, keep about the same sales level as today (maybe grow a little bit), and the Mac remains healthy with new OS and incremental h/w improvements.
I hope Apple goes down path A, but it isn't hard to see them decide on Path B.
Microsoft’s inability to move off of x86 has been a tremendous problem. Apple, Samsung and Google are driving an alternative chip architecture that is now moving much faster than Intel’s. Microsoft has to move or risk becoming irrelevant.
The problem is that the Qualcomm chip isn’t a great performer. Samsung’s Exynos chips perform at the same level while returning much better battery life. At the wearable level, Samsung’s Exynos 7270 far exceeds the Snapdragon wear 2100.
So Microsoft has tied itself to a chip manufacturer that trails Apple by a very substantial margin, even trails Samsung and must support legacy code. Microsoft could rewrite Office as a cross platform application, but that will never happen. Have people forgotten what happened when Apple rewrote Pages and Keynote to be cross platform applications and in the process dropped legacy support?!? Office is orders of magnitude more important to the business market than Apple’s suite ever was. The outcry would be enormous.
Hence Microsoft is forced to support legacy code on a chip by the least capable of the high end chip manufacturers. It’s why it would be absolutely imperative for Microsoft to obtain support for an Intel built x86 chip/emulator to accompany the Snapdragon 835. Otherwise performance would be terrible. And the migration over to ARM would stall once again as it did with Windows RT. However, Microsoft would continue to remain utterly dependent on Intel, adding cost and complexity to their machines which would still run much slower than the Apple built equivalents.
Microsoft would actually be better off working closely with Intel, investing in advancing the x86 architecture and ensuring it remains competitive, performance-wise, with ARM. It makes far more sense than trying to migrate to a new architecture and forced to support legacy code. Intel itself is totally committed to x86. And Microsoft will be forced to support the x86 platform for many years anyway. It would be better to stay on x86 where there is no additional baggage to support as office runs on it natively. The best outcome for Microsoft would be to see Intel become power competitive with ARM while staying on par in terms of performance. That’s a far more realistic scenario than for Qualcomm to become competitive with Apple, Intel and Samsung in CPU design and manufacturing.
With that in mind, Microsoft’s attempted move to ARM is astounding. They must really see Intel as being incompetent. While Intel will struggle against Apple and perhaps even Samsung, I actually see them as a far more capable CPU design and manufacturing company than Qualcomm.
I expect this to fail. I know personally, I would rather have a Surface machine with an Intel chip. It may not offer the same battery life, but compatibility is guaranteed with a robustness that I just don’t see happening with an ARM based machine. In fact, I would rather have a MacBook Pro running Windows on Fusion for Office support than a Microsoft machine running on an ARM chip supporting Office in emulation. The Microsoft machine will command a premium price and will lack technologies like thunderbolt connectivity. And who knows whether the developers at duet display will support the new Microsoft machine in allowing me to connect my iPad Pro as an external monitor. Supposedly it shouldn’t be an issues as the Qualcomm/MS device should support x86 fully. I doubt that such will be the case. And what about all of the hardware drivers in existence out there?
No thanks. I believe most of the market will feel the same way.