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Comment by maeil | Hacker News Reader

> IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to.

Plenty of them are buying Macbooks. It's definitely a small percentage of the worldwide market, but not entirely insignificant either.

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Yes, but that is because users demand it. And they do so begrudgingly. Users are not going to demand an ARM Windows laptop.

But will IT departments buy them if they are 100, 200, or $400 cheaper than a competing x86 machine?

That's the question that remains to be seen.

Can those users get all the software they need? Many users who want a mac are told no because some weird software they need doesn't run on it. Others only get a mac because some executive demanded IT port that software to mac. So long as companies have any x86 only software they won't let people switch. Often "art" departments get a specific exception and they get to avoid all the jobs that require x86 only software just to run their mac.

Of course these days more and more of that is moving the the cloud and all IT needs to a web browser that works. Thus making their job easier.

> Of course these days more and more of that is moving the the cloud and all IT needs to a web browser that works. Thus making their job easier.

This was the point I was going to make. While not completely dead, the days of desktop applications are quickly coming to a close. Almost everything is SAAS now or just electron apps which are highly portable.

Even if it's not saas or electron, the only two languages I'd do a desktop app in now-a-days is C# or Java. Both of which are fairly portable.

The big problem is Excel. Microsoft will make sure never to give that one up. Browser version isn't enough. I'm sure Apple has their reasons for not financing a full-fledged, compatible version, but if they would it would massively increase market share. I'm guessing it's strategic - e.g. not incurring the wrath of Microsoft or a different non-technical, non-marketshare reason.

The world outside of the SV tech bubble runs on Excel.

2 things.

1. Excel now-a-days is mostly just an electron app. That's what the office 365 conversion was effectively.

2. MS has supported ARM platforms for quite some time now. [1]

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/office-windows-11-arm-starts-...

[2] http://www.emulators.com/docs/abc_arm64ec_explained.htm

If Microsoft insists on treating them like phones with locked-down software stacks, still no.

Back when I worked for an F500 company, my development workstation was every bit as locked-down as a phone. Complete with having to select any software I wanted to use from the company's internal "app store" rather than installing it directly.

If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy (MS wants your company yo buy / subscribe to windows too).

And google sheets in my opinion is not good for complicated stuff - the constant lag..

I would bet 95%+ of people who use Excel are not affected by any difference between Excel for macOS versus Windows.

I work in a large enterprise company, have both windows and mac machines, and excel works equally great in both, but more and more excel runs in a browser.

We mostly email links to spreadsheets running in cloud. So it really doesn't matter what your OS is any more from an excel perspective, as long as your computer can run a modern browser you are good.

From what I've seen your company is an exception. Yes, for 95% of users, browser/Mac Excel is more than enough. But the non-tech companies I've seen still don't want to get Macs because of that 5%, they just don't want to bother with having to support two platforms. And leadership obviously doesn't care/have no idea.

Excel in browser is unreaponsive, laggy and unproductive for power users.

It is like a toy version of the standalone app.

Also it sucks with lists, pivot tables...

95% of people who use Photoshop would probably be served just fine by Krita, or even GIMP if they learned the somewhat wonky UI, and would save a ton of money in the process. However, people usually want to use the "standard" because of some vague fear that the alternative isn't 100.00% compatible, or that it won't have some obscure feature that they don't even know about yet, etc. I think Excel is exactly like this today, and so is Word. There are many alternatives that are just as good (and much cheaper) for 99% of users, but people still want to stick with "the standard" instead of taking a small risk on something different.

Maybe in the coming Great Depression of 2025, people will think differently and start looking at cheaper alternatives.

I was disputing this claim:

> If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy

The nominal cost of Excel was not the topic being discussed. It was the cost of using Excel for MacOS rather than Excel for Windows.

Almost no one needs the Windows specific features of Excel, so almost no one needs to give up using macOS just because of Excel.

I agree, and I think my post supports that, in a way. I'm just saying 95% of people probably could work just fine with GSheets or LibreOffice or whatever, but the very same is true for MacExcel (even more true, in fact, because it's closer to WinExcel than the alternatives).

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