Windows on Arm’s Last Stand? (Premium)

The consensus in the community is that Windows on Arm (WOA) is doomed, and that this platform will never go mainstream, let alone take over as the primary PC platform. And while I’m as clear-eyed as I can be on this topic, given my years of experience with WOA and the many WOA-based PCs I’ve tested, I do believe it still has a chance to succeed. And that’s true even if I remove emotion from the equation. Because truth be told, we need WOA.

In my Programming Windows series and the resulting book Windows Everywhere, I observed that the history of Windows can be seen as a series of reactions to competitors, market trends, and internal forces that were seeking change. Along the way, Microsoft worked to improve and adapt Windows to an incredible variety of new use cases, form factors, and competition. 40 years after its inception, Windows today would at least be familiar to those hardy few who used the first version, but I suspect that they would also be shocked both by its evolution and by the missteps that temporarily derailed progress along the way.

From my perspective as a Windows historian of sorts, I see many key milestones over the years. The moment when two low-level engineers rescued the otherwise abandoned product by figuring out how to adapt it for the 32-bit world, kicking off the escalating successes of Windows 3.0 and 3.1. Bill Gates’s decision to hire Dave Cutler and a team of ex-DEC engineers to create Windows NT. Jim Allchin’s stewardship in transitioning Windows to that NT codebase. The rise of the Internet and Microsoft’s bungled response with .NET and Longhorn. Dave Cutler’s adoption of the AMD x64 hardware platform as the way forward in the 64-bit world we are still within. The rise of mobile with the iPhone and the iPad, leading to the disastrous release of Windows 8. The pivot back to the desktop with Windows 10. And the Windows 11 push, which I can now tell you was a reaction to Apple Silicon and the Mac, and an era that’s not yet discussed in this series or book. (I will get to that in a future update.)

I’ve been holding that Windows 11 revelation in my back pocket, so to speak, but it bears on today’s discussion. What I can tell you is that it’s been confirmed by two highly placed sources, both former Microsoft executives: The software giant was so freaked out by Apple’s successes with the release of its initial M1 chipset in late 2020 and the ease at which it transitioned the user base and application ecosystem to this new platform, that it felt it needed to respond quickly. And so it threw together Windows 11 using left-over ideas from Windows 10X and threw it out the door before it was fully baked less than a year later. The theory was that it was better to ship quickly with mistakes and fix them over time than it was to wait until it was ready.

This is, of course, where WOA enters the picture.

The chipsets that power WOA-based PCs, like those made by Apple for the Mac, are bas...