It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM opportunity with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow managed to not succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story.
Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience was just not there.
We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux distros if Windows on ARM had taken off.
Microsoft also saw the opportunity of tablet computing, media players, smartphones, and basically every other category where Apple has kicked them the pants despite coming out way later.
In this particular case, Microsoft wanted an iPad, right down to the complete and total lockout of all third-party app distribution. They wrote a completely new UI toolkit for fullscreen tablet apps that only Store apps could make use of, then shipped an ARM port that refused to load anything but those signed fullscreen tablet apps. The comparatively less-locked-down Intel models succeeded far better than the WinRT/ARM ones, so the lesson was mislearned as "people want Intel".
Apple knows that interfering with how people get their software to try and collect revenue is not a great idea; that's why the M1 Macs have the same security policy as Intel/T2 ones. If they had locked it down iOS style, creative professionals would be fleeing the Mac in droves and Adobe would seriously start considering native Photoshop on Linux.
Perhaps it's because the M1 is not just a random ARM chipset.
For those wondering why Apple has a market cap of $2T this may be a good reason.
They have the ability to stage, time and deliver something like the M1 Mac whereas other massive corporations like Microsoft, Google, Intel, etc simply can't.
Well, from all appearances Warner Brothers saw the wild success of Avengers and decided they needed a big superhero mashup, thus the disastrous rush to create a Justice League movie without the gradual build-up of story lines and characters that the Marvel films produced.
Apple takes the Marvel approach to their technologies: releases features (of varying initial quality, admittedly) that gradually improve and are incorporated into bigger and better products.
Siri has never been best-in-class for anything, but has been a big part of making Apple Watch and AirPods so successful.
Apple invested in their own CPU designs for more than a decade before finally unveiling the M1 lineup.
Apple chose to shrink the Mac operating system to fit the iPhone, instead of porting the iPod OS, which gave them a unified set of APIs, and has made it practical to have Catalyst as a (still somewhat raw as I understand it) toolkit for writing software across iPhone, iPad, and macOS, plus of course iPhone and iPad apps can run natively on M1.
Most of Apple's competitors lack the freedom or the desire to bet the company on a specific direction; Microsoft of course has released Windows for ARM but has not, and cannot, tell their partners they have two years to switch or get left behind, for example.
Apple can set long-term strategic goals and follow through on them.
Yeah, Apple definitely deserves a lot of praise on these chips. They are not even incremental improvements but drastic ones which will probably change the landscape completely.
Like AWS was working on their own ARM chips, they now have a benchmark to go against if they even can. In DCs a lot of spend is on just power consumption. If these chips can really drive compute in servers at a much lower power consumption, it is just not monetarily good for the company but good for the planet too.
I think they are to blame. Qualcomm is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) manufacturer of ARM chips, yet they still simply use reference designs. Besides, for the next flagship (Snapdragon 888) they switched to Samsung 5nm (inferior to TSMC 5nm) and they're not even using the ARM-recommended 8MB L3 cache, but staying with 4MB.
It seems benchmarks for tha SoC aren't bad, but it really shows that they aren't really trying to catch up to Apple.
Yes and no. The problem is those standard designs have to please a very wide spectrum of customers, so in a lot of the tradeoffs in chip design (like area vs performance) they tend to lean more towards keeping area small. The Cortex X1 is supposed to change that, though, but it's very new.
> It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM opportunity with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow managed to not succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story.
It's definitely not a stellar ARM laptop story, but the ARM laptops have been at market for years prior to the ARM Macbook release. Not porting Chrome for the initial release was a huge blunder IMO. No one wants to use Edge. Having a chip with performance parity targeted at Intel's i5 might have been a mistake, too.
But (while admittedly not as stellar as M1 Macbook) we have options: the Envy X2, Yoga/Flex 5G, Surface Pro X, Galaxy Book S.
The M1 validates Microsoft's strategy to embrace ARM. Hopefully the third-party software devs are able to port their software in order to make this transition easier.
Qualcomm stopped their own CPU design a while back and if they'd have kept that going then perhaps there would be a better competitor to the M1. Or maybe they just need to drop in a better reference design from ARM?
My hypothesis for why it failed is because the only real value Windows provides is with legacy Windows applications, which their ARM platform did not provide (at least to a comparible level).
Qualcomm will supply whatever customers will demand, Die area of apple chips is significantly bigger than qc chips, if qc were to make similar chips will microsoft or for that matter any other vendor pay for it? it all comes down to that.
With the RT, yes it was indeed locked as the market pattern and target at the time (with iPad and Android tablets) have been to lock the system at the benefit of better curation and more integrated experience (well some will point out and argue that this was more of a lock-in, but obviously a Windows without malware was a goal also). The newer ARM attempt however were a complete reversal: Microsoft had dropped the focus on phone and (to an extent) tablet markets and even recent first-party Surface have unlockable boot systems, something that was impossible with Surface RT devices.
Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience was just not there.
We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux distros if Windows on ARM had taken off.