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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

If I remember correctly, the CEO at the time Steve Ballmer said they were betting the farm on mobile and ARM-based tablet computing. They went very hard on mobile until SatNad came along and killed it.

(Former Touch Diamond user here.)

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And here we are, in a world where Apple has made arm work wonders for them and Windows still isn't really a thing on ARM 10 years after ballmer resigned.

Then again arm doesn't seem to be necessary when looking at AMDs APU offerings. It was just a decade of intel struggling with their fabs.

Windows is definitely on arm. It just sucks because Qualcomm failed to deliver a good cpu package. The experience is within a stones throw of Apple, though.

I also have one of the new AMD 300 AI platforms, and it still can’t do power right. Either the laptop is miserably slow on battery, or runs way too hot on power.

Yes, it is on arm and has been for decades in some form, but it's still nowhere near its M1 moment.

I think the bigger issue is legacy software on Windows. It is Windows biggest moat and also their biggest albatross. So many companies and individuals rely on a specific piece of software that will never be ported to ARM. Microsoft can’t force the conversion. Developers have no incentive to support both until there is a critical mass of users and there will never be a critical mass of users unless ARM is 3x better than whatever Intel / AMD can deliver. On mobile it got close for a moment in terms of efficiency and then Intel and AMD immediately closed the gap. No incentive for users to switch.

They really should do a clean slate OS where native apps are all C# and legacy stuff is run in a VM. An ARM Xbox would also help develop a gaming ecosystem without the massive legacy concerns.

But then they lose their moat. Why not Linux then? Why not Mac OS?

Relevant: Singularity/Midori (2003–2015)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

https://web.archive.org/web/20090112172352/http://research.m...

https://read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs261-f11/singul...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180228191626/https://archive.c...

You bring up bad memories. I fucking hated my htc touch diamond. It was pretty but man was it slow.

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