Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by bla3 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

bla3·

How many people are there on windows arm? It doesn't seem super popular.

If anything, this looks like Google thinking that that might be changing.

Does anyone know if there are new windows arm products that might make it more popular?

View on HN

I'm a very technical user, but my personal travel device is the Robo & Kala Surface alternative (bought for around $650 with detachable keyboard). Runs on ARM and handles emulation surprisingly well. What's super nice is that ARM Android apps runs seamlessly via Subsystem for Android, making travel easy since I can use the Android app for whatever service I want (Disney, Netflix, etc) and sync/download content in advance. I remote into more capable devices if I need additional horsepower, but it really is completely usable already.

It's not really happening yet but there's a renewed push to make it happen, with MS partnering with Qualcomm on a high performance mobile SOC that's meant to compete with Apples M-series SOCs, but it remains to be seen if OEMs will bite or just keep using the tried and true x86 parts. This isn't the first time MS has tried to make Windows ARM a thing.

I assume Microsoft will release a Surface or two with the new soc. Lenovo probably too since they released with the older qualcomm mobile SoCs. It all boils down to the actual real world performance of the new Soc, battery life etc.

Personally most software I run today would run fine on arm or it's web based so if the reviews look good I'm probably buying one.

> How many people are there on windows arm? It doesn't seem super popular.

> If anything, this looks like Google thinking that that might be changing.

I don't think you can necessarily interpret one of those to be the cause of the other; if anything, Chrome being supported might be a _necessary_ for the platform to get popular in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com