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 Windows releases, and then, when that happens, put it in Release Preview.  That should work.

Also, while Microsoft won’t release Windows 11 on Arm on ISO for reasons that escape me, people have made their own, and so it’s possible you could find a build 22621 ISO for Arm out there somewhere or soon will.

Intel or AMD?

Daninbusiness asks:

Paul, do you have any preferences between Intel and AMD processors on offer these days? It seems like they are overall fairly even, though depending on workload and use case one might be preferable over the other.

Yeah. A year ago, I would have said that I was skewing back towards AMD, but with Intel finally adopting hybrid architectures in their mainstream Core chipsets—and expanding them with new model lines—I feel like they’re back in a good place. I’m not a hardware expert, but I do feel like they’re in comparable places now. (And given Intel’s scale, they can probably make a case for having the most powerful chipset options.)

The future of Windows on Arm

Daninbusiness also asks:

Any idea on future direction of Windows on ARM? It seems stagnant these days but perhaps some new chipsets might make it a bit more viable?

Yep.

We’ve seen an incredible surge of Windows on Arm updates over the past year, starting with the x64 emulation that launched with Windows 11 (and the related ARM64EC technologies, which will help bridge the platform transition too). But Windows on Arm is still stuck in a holding pattern because even Qualcomm’s very latest chipsets offer garbage performance and don’t live up to the promises of “Intel Core i5”-level performance. It’s not even close.

Our final hope for this platform rests in Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia, which licensed had Arm chipset designs for use in high-performance PCs. Qualcomm is adapting the Nuvia designs to create a new generation of Windows on Arm chipsets, and we still expect it to announce the first of these in late 2022, probably at its normal December launch event. Which means that the first PCs based on this new design won’t appear until the first half of 2023 (with likely CES 2023 announcements).

This article is a year old, but nothing has changed yet, from what I can tell.

Expats, Mexico, and the future

jeroendegrebber asks:

This question is not technology related at all, so feel free to ignore it, but since I really enjoy your content about Mexico here and on youtube, I’d like to ask it here anyway.

Not at all. This isn’t only about technology. You can ask me anything.

During my 2018 trip through South America, I met several American expats who cited lower cost of living and lower cost of (good to excellent) medical care as some of their reasons for moving over. Has the state of medical care in Mexico been a consideration for you? If you’d break a leg (knocking on wood here) would you take the next flight to the US or stay for treatment in Mexico for recovery?

So this is a big discussion, probably several discussions. But to frame this, my wife and I do have a list of Mexico’s pros and cons, and we can hopefully discuss all that in a series of videos on Eternal Spring soon. And health care is absolutely part of that.

Also semi-related, when I think back to how all this started, my general memory is that I started getting serious about Mexico in “early 2021,” and that at some point I went to my wife and said, “this is going to sound crazy, but I think we need to look at Mexico.” Which is all true, but I’d been wondering exactly when this happened and what it was that kicked off this path. I did recall watching some YouTube videos at or near the beginning of this, and so I started there. And to my surprise, I found the exact day, January 31, 2021, when I watched the first videos about moving to/retiring to Mexico. Incredible. (Also incredible: we walked into the apartment that we eventually purchased almost exactly one year later, on January 30, 2022.)

That got my wondering about why I found those videos, since they wouldn’t have appeared in my YouTube feed randomly or organically. And there, I had an inkling of how it happened: because of our interest in Europe and our long-time desire to split time between two places, I had years earlier subscribed to an email newsletter from Live and Invest Overseas, and so I checked my email history to see if they had sent anything out around that time. And sure enough, every January, they publish a “best places to retire overseas” list that gets a lot of mainstream news coverage. And Mexico is always number one or two on that list. (Portugal is always one or two also, and that is a place we’ve often considered too.)

The point of that story is that the very first nudge towards Mexico was about the cost of living, basically, mirroring what the expats you ran into said. That’s not as one-sided as it sounds: like any other decision, moving to or buying a place in any location is a matrix of decisions, and it’s never just one thing. And if Mexico was just affordable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But in researching Mexico, I kind of went through this list of things that were important and never ran into any major blockers. Which is why I started the conversation with my wife. And so on.

Anyway, health care factors into this too, as do related things like climate, altitude (which can be brutal from a cardio perspective), and so on. We’re not getting any younger, and health care is and will continue to be a concern. And as noted, it’s a big discussion.

A few general points.

Given that most Americans have an unfairly (and, one might say, uneducated) negative opinion about Mexico, it will surely surprise most to discover that the health care there is, as you say, good to excellent, and it is much less expensive. There are public and private health care plans, but Americans often just pay out of pocket for whatever it is—from prescriptions all the way up to major surgery—and pay much less than they would with their US health care plan and their deductibles. Many (most?) Mexican doctors and surgeons are educated in the United States and then move back home.

There is also a system in place there that we’ve come to know and love in Europe, too, where many things that require a doctor or a prescription can be handled at a local pharmacy without any need for an appointment or a checkup. And it’s all so inexpensive. People often come to Mexico to buy their prescription medicines over the counter at a vast discount. They also come here for dental and medical procedures as a weird form of tourism, again saving money.

But for us specifically, there is the now and then there is the future, which is uncertain. For now, of course, we have a home here, jobs, and US health care, and we live here full-time, and none of that is changing soon. Were I to require some form of medical care while visiting Mexico, what I would do would depend on the situation, but if it was major and I could fly, I’d probably just come home. If I broke my leg, as you suggest, I’d probably get that fixed there if that made sense. It depends.

In the future, we will look at getting public or private health care in Mexico in addition to whatever coverage we have in the US. And then we’ll see.

In some distant future where we might be spending even more time there, or more time there than we do in the U.S.—and by this time we would have some form of residency—again, we’ll see. We’ll reassess based on time and experience as we go. But for us, health care is one of many things that did not exclude Mexico from consideration. And, again, my wife and I hope to go through all that soon.