Ask Paul: June 17 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This installment of Ask Paul ranges from Windows on Arm to Mexico, so let’s get the weekend started.
Why not use Xbox as a PC?
Harrymyhre asks:

I used to see Xbox machines with connected keyboards in front of big monitors at the Microsoft store. Why didn’t Microsoft ever try to just the Xbox as a computer? It always seemed so obvious to me.

It’s because the Xbox consoles aren’t designed as general-purpose computers, but rather as game consoles with ancillary digital media capabilities. And this is true for both the software and the hardware. On the software end, modern Xbox consoles run on a heavily modified version of Hyper-V Server with virtualization partitions that are optimized for a single foreground task, which is typically whatever game you’re running. I guess you could make a case for the hardware being technically capable of running Windows (or whatever) but Microsoft would need to wipe whatever was on there and then adapt Windows to take advantage of the machines’ unique architectures. But ... to what end?

This might be analogous to running macOS on an iPhone: it “could” work, I guess, but … why? The system was designed using macOS as a base, but everything unnecessary for its specific use cases was removed, and unique new capabilities that don’t apply to the Mac were added. And then it evolved on a separate track over time, and the two platforms are unique despite their common ancestry. If anything, Xbox is even more different from Windows PCs.
Windows 11 on Arm 22H2
Ivarh asks:

Hi Paul, as a Mac user that have moved to apple silicone my exposure to windows is now through a VDI for my work and as a Windows 11 ARM VM. I heard that a release candidate of win11 was out on the preview ring and after making a copy of my win11 VM I added the copy to the developer preview ring. I set it up as you described on windows weekly to jump off the preview ring once the next version is out. I was told that a new version of windows 11 was available but when looking in windows update no new version is offered. Is the preview release only available for x86?

No, it’s on Arm as well. But I had a similar issue on a few x64-based PCs: once 22621 (22H2) was released to the Release Preview channel, I switched to that on a few new installs and was never offered the build. So I ended up switching to the Beta channel and was then offered the build.

I don’t know why that happened, but because you’re going to use this on a Mac (presumably via Parallels, though it doesn’t matter), and that setup isn’t officially supported, you’re going to need to keep it somewhere in the Insider Preview as it won’t activate. And that means you’ll be on some treadmill of keeping it updated with new builds over time. Release Preview is definitely the least aggressive, but one thing to try is: put it on the Beta channel to get the 22H2 build, configure it to unenroll the device when the next version of Wind...