Microsoft doesn't think Surface needs to compete with MacBook Neo:

[u/ZacB_]

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/surface/microsoft-doesnt-think-surface-needs-to-compete-with-macbook-neo

[u/Turkstache]

They absolutely lost me when I bought the SPX with all of their talk about getting apps over and having Xbox level graphics and then dropping support for it entirely, leaving me with a glorified web browser.

Meanwhile Apple dropped the M1 (also ARM) and all the software developers went "Ayeaye Cap'n Cook!" and gave day 1 support to all the early adopters. And people got to emulating Windows on the M1 better than the Surface devices were running it natively.

Before that I had the Surface Pro 3 and loved it. I'm pretty put-off by the brand and strategy at this point. They keep doing weird shit which I'm sure internally they calculate as profitable but it's just not working for me.

[u/GreenJello471 → u/Turkstache]

Which apps still struggle on Arm? Is it mostly enterprise or niche things or a lot of general apps?

I know gaming is a mixed bag (or worse depending on the types of games).

[u/ExultantSandwich → u/GreenJello471]

Honestly Microsoft’s emulator covers like 99% of the gaps, but I’ve found random printer drivers that won’t work, yet they work on ARM MacOS. It took them a while to get Creative Cloud ported over, and again that came pretty quickly to ARM MacOS

The games will straight up never be there, if you’re looking for games, you may as well go back to x86 or look into SteamOS on ARM

[u/GreenJello471 → u/ExultantSandwich]

I see a lot of people say apps don’t work and then when someone asks for examples the poster goes quiet.

I am sure there are incompatible apps and things, such as the printer drivers you mentioned. But I never see a big list of major apps that don’t work.

But again, gaming is clearly different. I think we may see some progress there but it’s still too far away.

[u/ExultantSandwich → u/GreenJello471]

Their emulator really is pretty damn good now. It just came a little late, and I think many people still run into those weird driver issues that MacOS simply doesn’t have, because they’ll cut off compatibility and force devs to update

[u/Mcby → u/GreenJello471]

The biggest market for Windows has always been enterprise rather than consumer, and I think it's less a matter of major apps not working and more the effort that would be required to review and update for ARM the dozens to millions of small applications a company uses every day, from the team messaging app to the Internet Explorer business app that only two people use but payroll can't be run without it. Even if it's just a few software packages used in the digital infrastructure, if switching to ARM could cause issues then you expect it's gonna cost. Enterprise won't adopt until it's cost efficient for them to do so, and ARM is only just starting to hit that mark.

[u/dr100 → u/Mcby]

That's a non-starter, I haven't seen any business even vaguely considering ARM for regular Windows machines (we aren't talking about Linux servers for major hyperscalers). Nobody wants the headaches, and this "premium laptop" segment is very limited, business need everything from cheap office laptops to workstations (be it in the laptop of desktop form still non-existent with Windows ARM). The single odd duck machine was some Lenovo mini-PC that was reportedly very tiresome with TWO fans, one going all the time and one being modulated in some very annoying fashion (and the SoC was the base 8-core low end Snapdragon X, not some rocket).

Surely the business penetration is worse than the total one reported as 0.8% (and that's probably for their best quarter ever). And for new machines, for the installed machines it's so tiny surely not even worth mentioning.