If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

The new Microsoft Surface Arm laptops are in the wild now and getting properly tested. The Verge did a full set of benchmarks that conclude with a few relevant points:

It runs a little faster than a MacBook Air and quite a bit slower than a MacBook Pro. These really are aimed at the MacBook Air.
Battery life is behind the MacBook Air’s. This isn’t a surprise, as I suspect they have a lot of experience with the MacBook Air.

Together, these two points make sense. They upped the clock cycle count to outperform the MacBook Air — which is an admittedly sexy headline for Microsoft — at the expense of some battery life. Regardless, I think it’s great news that people running Windows now have an option that’s competitive with MacBook Air performance and battery life. Now, if it just ran a better operating system…

Windows 365 for Windows on the Mac and iPad?

Microsoft has announced Windows 365, a new service where you can pay a subscription for a Windows PC in the cloud that you can run on your other devices (like a Mac or iPad). These won’t be gaming class machines like you could get from Shadow, but they’ll also probably be less expensive and easier to maintain.

I’m hearing from plenty of Mac users that are worried about losing access to Windows as Apple Silicon spreads throughout the line. This could be the solution. We’re still waiting on pricing and some real-world usage reporting, but Windows 365 is set to launch on August 2, so I expect we’ll be learning a lot more soon.

Windows and Apple Silicon

Things are evolving quickly for folks who want to run Windows on the new Apple silicon Macs. Hackers figured it out first, but now Parallels has Windows for ARM support working in its version 16 preview. Granted, this is only for Windows for ARM (vs. Windows for x86), but I didn’t expect this to happen so fast.

It’s still unclear if Microsoft is interested in playing along and offering Windows for ARM for sale separate from Windows for ARM hardware. Does that make sense when the Apple silicon hardware is both faster and lasts longer than traditional ARM hardware? Is that screwing over all those other Microsoft partners?

A month ago, I would have said that official support for Windows on Apple silicon is a pipe dream. Now I’m not so sure.