Who is the target market for this?
As an Apple user who can’t make iPad OS work I am always tempted by the surface but..
Every time I contemplate the surface (I like the hardware / concept) it seems the software I might want to use doesn’t support arm..
"Enterprise" people. There's this whole other world of legacy enterprise software where people do things that run companies, write large-scale software with an ancient version of .NET, and run this software on Windows servers.
... who can't run half of their large-scale software with an ancient version of .NET on Arm.
... yet they still struggle to try and port their code to a newer .net version that does run on ARM. And do a bunch of other work tasks that can utilize this hardware.
(But, you bring up a great point, regardless!)
Here is a particularly irritating example. Cabinet Vision, some CAD type of software.
Requires ancient .NET. That actually is available for Arm though.
Required Jet DB driver 2010, which doesn’t exist on Arm, although it’s only needed for the installer.
Requires SQL Server embedded 2012 and 2016, which don’t exist on Arm at all. Yep, both versions.
Also required PowerShell version 2, which was deprecated in 2017, although they magically figured out how to fix that once Windows 10 was EOL’d and Win. 11 doesn’t support v2.
The vendor has zero plans to ever support this on Arm.
They will eventually get their lunch eaten by a new competitor who decides to just release a macOS version.
I try to avoid Microsoft products these days (modern dotnet is pretty nice though), but from my past experience, I believe every bit of this and have run into all of these with other software, including the requiring of multiple versions of MSSQL Embedded, which is just unholy.
Not really Microsoft’s fault, except that their exceptional backwards compatibility means vendors get away with requiring 16-year-old libraries.
It’s in the first line of the article. It’s for people that make the world, obviously
> the software I might want to use doesn’t support arm
Doesn't Windows come with something like Apple's Rosetta to do on the fly translation? I expect it wouldn't work with games, but most other kinds of software should work.
Rosetta worked quite well for Apple so I would expect Microsoft could do something similar.
Yes, its called prism, supposedly Microsoft is making improvements to it also specifically to go along with this release.
It's not as good as Rosetta 2 was, but its still pretty good.
Problem is not everything runs through emulation though. There's still a lot of edge cases for super old enterprise crap.
I kind of find it hard to believe they would use the name prism...
When I read it, the first thing I thought of is the NSA program named PRISM.
Anyway, I was curious so I googled for differences between the Apple and Microsoft programs and Apple included x86 translation circuitry on their CPU. I wonder why Microsoft didn't do the same?
Probably because MS wasn't involved in the silicon at all. The Snapdragon X Elite was entirely Qualcomm/Nuvia. Not sure why they skipped it though.
I remember when they first pivoted from multiperson multitouch tables to tablets. It sounded like a really cool device - even got me to walk into a Microsoft store.
Then I realized that it used the same shitty Windows with the same shitty registry that I had mostly avoided for my whole life to that point. I certainly wasn't jumping in on that tablet.
creative industry/enterprise. similar to Asus ProArt line and high end ThinkPad workstations
>Who is the target market for this?
People who actually do real work and are interested in gaming, unlike people who just buy Macbooks to run VsCode and browse the web.
I mean, I used to be - with the disclaimer that I worked at Microsoft for a while (left in 2019), there was a hot minute when Surface devices were good and on an upward trajectory to become great. Microsoft was doing interesting things with new form factors and interface devices-- the Surface Book, Studio and Dial weren't all hits, but they were some of the only noteworthy experiments in PCs-- and they actually cared about build quality in a way pretty much no other PC manufacturer did.
Then Panay left, Windows 11 has been a debacle, and Nadella seems to give zero fucks about anything which isn't Copilot or Azure, so the Surface momentum that they spent so much time building has just coasted to a complete stop. It's sad.
Moreover, the Surface Pro 1 and 2 used Wacom EMR styluses --- still regret not getting one, but then Samsung did the Galaxy Book 12 (which was about perfect), so I was _finally_ able to replace my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 (the Toshiba Encore 2 Write was a necessary stop-gap).
These days I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (w/ a spare which I panick bought when I wasn't sure if they would do a Book 4 --- now they're up to a 5), Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and have a Wacom One on my MacBook (both of which need upgrading....)
> coasted to a complete stop
I’m not sure how you say that on a release that is literally about new surface hardware