Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 212 posts

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#101

Post by scholia »

protomyth wrote: post #76

I really gotta wonder if this was a long term plan or in response to Intel leaving MS in the lurch with the changes to x86 strategy on mobile or a bit of both.

Clearly a long-term plan because Microsoft wouldn't have been able to do it so quickly.

Also, Intel did not leave Microsoft in the lurch: Intel left Intel in the lurch.

It made no difference at all to Microsoft, which already had Windows on ARM smartphones and tablets. It didn't even lose any revenue, because Windows is free on small screen devices.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#102

Post by bitmapbrother »

UK-AL wrote: post #90
tluyben2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have the capital to startup and launch in probably any industry, They tried that more than a few times and failed. X-box worked, but portable music players, mobile and search would be things they pumped massive amounts of money into and didn't get very far with. But yes, I would like choice above all. I am not a big Windows fan, but Android is really starting to annoy me and iOS (or at least the rules around i…

Bing has 30-40% of the market for search. Remember lots of search engines are just rebranded bing.

40% in the US seems way too high. And a large part of that percentage probably comes from Yahoo - whose future seems uncertain. Also, a lot of those rebranding efforts aren't exactly free so any money they do make is usually shared.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#103

Post by scholia »

wlesieutre wrote: post #43
jarjoura wrote: post #28

Hmm, x86 emulation on ARM is the most interesting nugget. No one here thinks Windows Phone will be back in any serious capacity and that brand is pretty much finished. Looks like this will run similar to how Apple got PowerPC apps running on early Intel Macs. Emulated just enough to cross the bridge to the Intel bits so that performance wasn't completely unusable. You could really run Adobe Photoshop, which would hav…

My hunch is a Surface Phone that can hook up to a larger screen and become a full computer, but I'm not sure how that would work if you ever need data that's in a win32 app while you're mobile. Guess it could run a desktop like you can use VNC/RDP apps on phones, let you pan and zoom around? Not a great experience, but then again, touch input on the Windows desktop on the whole Surface line is occasionally janky when…

> ever need data that's in a win32 app while you're mobile

Your data is assumed to be in the cloud, or on your SD card. If not, you do what we did roughly 20 years ago from (pre-smartphone) PocketPC handhelds: used RDP.

This was so much fun, you remembered to stick it on a ComnpactFlash card for next time ;-)

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#104

Post by protomyth »

scholia wrote: post #101
protomyth wrote: post #76

I really gotta wonder if this was a long term plan or in response to Intel leaving MS in the lurch with the changes to x86 strategy on mobile or a bit of both.

Clearly a long-term plan because Microsoft wouldn't have been able to do it so quickly. Also, Intel did not leave Microsoft in the lurch: Intel left Intel in the lurch. It made no difference at all to Microsoft, which already had Windows on ARM smartphones and tablets. It didn't even lose any revenue, because Windows is free on small screen devices.

I think it screwed up Microsoft's original Surface Phone strategy if the tech press is to be believed.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#105

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

mhomde wrote: post #16

I'm more than a little confused about MS "mobile" strategy. Continuum sounds like a good idea, in theory. For enterprise I can kinda see it be attractive to just give your employees mobile phones and hook the office up with continuum docks. But it seems problematic in more than one aspect. For starters it's based on the fact that people are going to want to use a windows mobile as their primary device to start with.…

> I could never wrap my head around how strategically MS could just let mobile go and not take the fight. It seems so integral to so many other efforts.

Real men have mobile platforms.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#106

Post by interssting994 »

Interesting. This has the potential for novel hardware designs becoming more commonplace. Think generic branded but still decent quality Nintendo Switch-clones that can run the Windows catalog of games? Perhaps not AAA titles, but there are a ton of older titles.

I had hoped Valve would throw down on a handheld as part of the Steam on Linux initiative. Unfortunately, they focused on half-baked gadgets intending to displace consoles. A handheld with proper physical controls, a built-in, fairly open by walled garden standards, marketplace, modern iPad level performance running Linux? Yes, please.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#107

Post by raminonstuff »

raminonstuff wrote: post #99

Wow I just did a quick search here and found zero references to the word "Internet"! Nobody mentions the IoT. Internet of Things is and will be running on ARM CPUs, ARM GPUs, ARM Display, ARM Video, etc. Not having your major OS on ARM means you are behind Android, behind iOS, behind Linux, behind IoT and basically behind the world... Have you seen Windows 10 IoT Core? https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/io…

I am waiting to see the MacBook Pro run on ARM with 10x more battery life :)

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#108

Post by criddell »

scholia wrote: post #96
criddell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't write papers or create spreadsheets. Their phone is their computer. The market that Microsoft seems to be after seems small to me. You already can do Chromebook like stuff with a phone and bluetooth keyboard and I do see people using that combination, just not very often. What are the applications that have an interface that will scale well between a 4" handheld display and three 28" desktop 4k disp…

They don't: there are different UIs for different screen sizes. Your data is in the cloud (eg a Word Document in OneDrive on on Azure) and you can access it from a full desktop program on a PC or Mac, from an app on iOS or Android, or via a web browser on any device that has one. This is a cross-platform vision that works both online and offline (unlike Google) and that ultimately doesn't care which device you use (u…

But that's not the vision from the article ("Microsoft is about to turn a phone into a real PC") or this thread.

Take a phone and plug in a bigger display and keyboard and mouse and suddenly it's a desktop computer. So a single application is going to need to cope with a 4" touchscreen display with no keyboard or mouse as well as a multi-monitor setup without touch, but with a keyboard and mouse.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#109

Post by eropple »

ralmidani wrote: post #87
gshulegaard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, did you support the Ubuntu Edge effort a couple years back? Why or why not? https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge#/ I ask because my perspective is that the convergence effort started a long time ago...perhaps as early as Canonical's original controversial release of the Unity desktop...and these efforts by larger players are more or less followers (albeit higher powered followers with larger m…

Even if the OS itself is free, using the modem requires a non-free blob. That's why I prefer to keep my phone and PC separate.

Do you have access to the firmware code in your keyboard? Your monitor?

I'm not criticizing your decision, and it's certainly yours to make, but people (and also Stallman) draw such very strange lines of demarcation about this stuff.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets

#110

Post by eropple »

tdb7893 wrote: post #65
nkrisc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for most people (the kind who don't read Hacker News) their phone is their primary computing device and likely the only one they own. There already is loads of sensitive data on these peoples' devices. The only difference is they aren't yet plugging it into random hardware.

I doubt you would give it access to arbitrary memory so to actually get the data they would need an exploit of the USB connections and while it increases the attack surface I don't think it increases it unreasonably. The larger concern to me would be someone could be capturing the keyboard and monitor you connect to and could get most of your information through that.

USB3 alternate modes happily allow DMA with host devices. If the device supports Thunderbolt as an alternate mode, that gets...tricky. And given that it's pretty likely that this posited setup would encourage the use of external graphics processing hardware...red flags, Batman.
Post reply on HN