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Comment by upon_drumhead | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone actually run windows on arm in any meaningful day to day job?

I do. (Disclaimer: I work at qualcomm and am a part of a "dogfooding" effort). It's certainly adequate for the work I'm doing - which involves developing on/for linux, so I'm logging in to the development systems remotely. So locally I'm running things like a browser, IM, MS Outlook.

I'm looking forward to Snapdragon X, there's definitely occasions where it feels like I could use some more local perfomance.

One of the irritating things is that there's no native Chrome release for Windows-on-ARM. MS suggests that we use Edge but I'm quite comfortable with Chrome. So I use Chromium instead and it's great except it seems to be missing some DRM magic or something and therefore anything like gif files or webp and most videos on most websites can't be played back. However youtube does seem to be clever enough to see the browser's limitations and transcode/filter the content to something acceptable to Chromium. If I want to see those videos I switch to Edge.

I love my Thinkpad X13s for day to day netadmin work. The hardware is absolutely solid and gorgeous and it performs quite well for the work I do. And while it's not strictly an ARM-only exclusive, the onboard UWB 5G is a delight on the road between client sites. Battery life is finally usable for me as well on the road with my weird requirements (like a visual light defect in my eyes making me basically demand full backlighting all the time).

It's good, it's fast, but it's not cheap.

Every Surface Pro X does, i bet. Mine does.

I think with the end of Microsoft's deal with Qualcomm we will see drastically more ARM devices, just because it would make it easier to run on Macs

> it would make it easier to run on Macs

But Apple doesn't ask HP or Dell to make its laptops. And Apple uses their own SoCs exclusively. So I don't think it would change anything other than some mild effect -- helping a larger shift in the developer ecosystem to make more developers accustomed to developing on ARM.

but why do consumers care?

their x86 laptops are fast enough

they probably get as much battery life as they practically need

ARM cpus likely won't change the price much

Microsoft and everyone else has to support x86 until doomsday no matter what

so why should a consumer pick one?

They certainly aren't power efficient enough, the main reason I hear people want PC laptops is they think they're going to play games on them, which is kind of the opposite.

Of course that is self-purchased laptops by young people; it doesn't really apply to cases where a school buys them.

It would enable Microsoft to sell Windows licences to use Windows on Macs. Right now you can't buy Windows for Mac.

Are you describing a "hackintosh" like configuration? Because that could be feasible but this would not happen commercially. First off: the Windows on ARM port was shipping on laptops/tablets to Apple shipping their first M1 devices. Apple wouldn't support a configuration running Windows on their laptop and Microsoft doesn't sell Windows for use on some system that the vendor didn't intend to have it. Windows is not Asahi Linux.

Microsoft had a PPC port of NT, and it never was a commercial offering for Powerbooks. Despite the fact that it could work, you couldn't get it out-of-the-box. And Microsoft obviously had x86 support and Windows-on-x86 macbooks was never a supported configuration by Microsoft nor Apple.

> Apple wouldn't support a configuration running Windows on their laptop and Microsoft doesn't sell Windows for use on some system that the vendor didn't intend to have it.

They did on x86; Windows runs fine on Apple hardware with Boot Camp with support from both Apple and Microsoft. Why would ARM be any different?

Microsoft explicitly links to Apples documentation on how to install Windows on MacBook's [1].

Microsoft is of cause selling Windows for any system, they don't care what it is running on (ignoring the deal with Qualcomm for ARM). Apple also explicitly tells you how to install Windows on MacBooks [2] (the intel ones, not the newer ones, as Microsoft hasn't released a ARM Windows edition so far).

Until recently everything you say wouldn't be feasible was working exactly as I described and I don't see why we can't go back to that state when the exclusive deal for Qualcomm ends.

[1]https://support.microsoft.com/de-de/topic/installieren-von-w... [2]https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201468

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