Microsoft says they’re confident they can catch up with Apple

Microsoft has announced an upcoming announcement scheduled for May 20th, in which they will reveal their new upcoming laptops powered by Arm chips, to compete with Apple’s M3 chip lineup. The reporting by The Verge suggests they will be powered by Qualcomm processors, which are the same type used in many Android phones and tablets.

This makes sense, given Apple’s pivot to Arm processors in all their products starting with the iPhone.

What’s the big deal with the new chips?

I asked ChatGPT to help me explain the difference between the old and new chip architectures. I edited what it wrote a little but i found it helpful to leave mostly intact.

CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing, the outgoing standard) and RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing, the new incoming standard) are two types of processor architectures, which are basically the way a computer's processor is designed to handle instructions (the basic commands it uses to perform tasks).
CISC processors, like the ones traditionally used in many personal computers, have a large set of complex instructions. This means they can do a lot of different things with each instruction, but this complexity can make them slower and more power-hungry.
RISC processors, on the other hand, have a smaller set of simpler instructions. This means they might need more instructions to do the same task, but each instruction is executed very quickly and efficiently. This simplicity can lead to faster performance and lower power consumption.
The big deal with the new chips coming out, especially those based on RISC architecture (like Apple's M chip series), is that they're able to offer high performance with better energy efficiency. This means devices can be faster, have longer battery life, and generate less heat, which is particularly important for portable devices like laptops and smartphones.

My take

There’s nothing inherently special about Apple’s Arm chips, and Microsoft is confident that they’ve figured out how to make the technology work for their products as well.

I have no real reason to doubt this, and I’m glad it’s happening because it should mean generally better computers for everyone. At least in the long run. What I am a bit worried about is what this transition will look like in the short term.

Part of Apple’s transition for the Mac from Intel chips to their Arm M1 chips was getting software written for one chip to run on the other. Or at least, getting software written for the old chips to run on the new ones. So I can think of a few ways for Microsoft to potentially screw this up. Not saying they will, just that there are different ways to fail at this.

1. There needs to be a compatibility layer for apps written for the old chips to run on new ones in order for people to have a reason to upgrade
2. there will likely need to be multiple forks of the next few versions of windows for each different chip architecture.
3. This likely means that at a certain point Microsoft will try to ‘force’ upgrades on customers by halting support for older machines
4. It will probably get harder to pirate windows or use it without activating it
5. Hopefully this will mean Windows will work better in more situations