Apple’s Arm-based silicon for future Macs could compel Microsoft to upgrade Windows on Arm for Surface Pro X and others, and by doing so seriously damage the Windows-Intel x86 alliance.
That’s according to Jean-Louis Gassée, author of the Monday Note blog and former Apple executive during the 1980s, mostly in the company years without co-founder Steve Jobs in command.
Gassée believes that switching from Apple to Apple Silicon, which has been shown to be able to run Microsoft’s Office applications when the Arm-based Surface Pro X could not, leaves Microsoft with an option.
“Forget Windows on Arm and cede modern PCs to Apple, or go ahead, fix app compatibility issues and offer an Arm-based alternative to new Apple Macs,” Gassée wrote in an article titled ‘Silicon from Apple: the Wintel step ‘.
“It is a false dilemma, of course. Microsoft will move on … with repercussions for the rest of the Windows PC industry.”
Gassée wonders what Windows OEMs like Asus, Dell and HP will do if Apple raises the bar for Arm on Macs, and Microsoft responds with better Arm Surface devices.
“Apple’s silicon will not only make better Macs, but it will force Microsoft to polish its Windows on Arm act, both hardware and software,” he writes.
“To compete, PC makers will have to do the same, they will ‘arm themselves’ because, apart from all defensive rhetoric, Apple and Microsoft will have made the x86 architecture feel like it really is: old.”
Intel, in Gassée’s opinion, is in a worse position now than when the smartphone boom was lost. Back then, it was failing on smartphones due to the amount of money it made from the x86 architecture thanks to the Intel-Windows duopoly.
“Now that union, that advantage is about to disappear. Intel will face Arm-based SoCs running Windows on Arm with applications, in quantities similar to PCs, at lower prices,” he writes.
“This leaves Intel with a path: if you can’t beat them, join them. Intel will retake an Arm license (it sold its Arm-based XScale business to Marvell in 2006) and present a competitive Arm SoC offering for OEM PCs. Margins will inevitably suffer as the Arm-based SoC field is filled with strong competitors like Qualcomm and Nvidia, who will surely be joined by arch-enemy AMD and others, ushering in a new era of PC. “
But former Windows boss Steven Sinofsky doesn’t think Microsoft is in the same position as Apple to take advantage of a transition to Arm-based CPUs for the desktop operating system.
“Apple can make Arm compatible with macOS APIs (for now) * because * it has a safe and efficient operating system … Arm OS on phones / iPads. Microsoft would simply have the messy silicon transition without the benefits of Arm “Sinofsky wrote.
Gassée stepped into Apple’s doomed Newton PDA and, after leaving in 1990 as an advocate of Apple’s high-margin strategy, created BeOS that ran on a Mac clone.
Apple almost acquired Be in the mid-1990s, but eventually bought Job’s NeXT, whose operating system became the basis for Mac OS X. Be in 2002 pulled a deal from Microsoft after accusing him of creating deals with original equipment manufacturers. to prevent your operating system from installing together with Windows.
