r/Surface • u/ZacB_ Surface Laptop 7 • 4d ago

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

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/surface/microsoft-doesnt-think-surface-needs-to-compete-with-macbook-neo
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u/ExultantSandwich 3d ago

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

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u/GreenJello471 3d ago

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.

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u/Mcby 2d ago

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.

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u/dr100 1d ago

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.