I spent last week in Hawaii with Qualcomm. The company had a lot to talk about, including next year's phone chipset, a chipset for handheld gaming, and, most fascinatingly and frustratingly, the latest step in its four-year odyssey to move Windows PCs over to low-power, "always connected" ARM-based chips.
In theory, ARMing Windows laptops would really stretch out battery life, which people love, without compromising performance, which people would hate. Qualcomm also really, really wants us to care about having 4G/5G in our laptops, which I can tell you is super convenient but doesn't seem to be much of a sales driver because everyone has a hotspot mode on their phone.
Apple just proved that ARM-powered laptops can be excellent; its M1-powered MacBook Pros have gotten rave reviews, including an Editors' Choice award from PCMag. But Apple can drag its whole ecosystem along with it. Nobody in the Windows world can really do the same.
First of all, Qualcomm's CPUs are slow. The company's "weak CPU, strong other blocks" approach works well on phones but poorly with Windows, which has spent the past several decades making most tasks run on a computer's CPU. Qualcomm's chips may get better in 2023 when they use custom cores based on Nuvia technology, but for now, they're bad. I tested a system based on Qualcomm's 7c chipset and had real trouble figuring out why any PC maker would pick it over Intel. Longer battery life is great, but you need to have some sort of baseline performance. (Qualcomm's latest argument for ARM laptops is that they'd be good for Zoom, but once again, you have to have competitive baseline performance.)
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Microsoft's mismanagement of this whole project has made everything far worse. Microsoft, development tooling companies, and app developers are all basically doing that Spider-Man pointing meme about why the experience sucks, but it's mostly Microsoft's fault. Microsoft sends the signals everyone else follows, and its signals have been lousy. There's no x64 emulation until Windows 11, which isn't even available yet on many machines, and Microsoft only released a native version of the OneDrive sync client this week. Remember, this project has been going on for four years.
This all tells the rest of the ecosystem that Windows on ARM is a third-rate side project with no actual urgency behind it, no matter how often Microsoft execs say they're pumped. Put your code where your mouth is, folks.
A lack of competition also clearly plays a role in the slow adoption of ARM for Windows. It came out recently that Qualcomm has had an exclusive on producing ARM processors for Windows, and monopolies lead to laziness and high prices. We've seen that with millimeter-wave modems, too; Qualcomm argues that the "mmWave tax" continues because there aren't enough mmWave carrier customers out there yet, but only having one supplier up until recently also didn't help.
Qualcomm really wants a bigger bite of the Windows laptop market. In 2023, Qualcomm says it will have Apple-competitive laptop chips, and Mediatek will offer Windows-compatible options as well, improving competition and lowering prices. But until Microsoft truly treats Windows on ARM as equal with Windows on x86, I don't think this platform shift is going anywhere. Should everyone involved give up? Tell me in the comments.
What Else Happened This Week?
- I benchmarked the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which is for phones, and the new development kit with the existing Snapdragon 7c, which is for laptops.
- The FAA basically said it will ground planes in bad weather if the wireless carriers turn on C-band 5G. This looks like an ultimatum, but I get the sense that the real solution will end up being a "buy new altimeters" fund.
- I reviewed Apple's $19 polishing cloth. Yes, the jokes write themselves, but for $19 I got a pretty good piece out of it. I just wish I had titled it "Rag Against the Machine."
- We have a fun story about phones you can't get in the US. There's a lot of them now, largely because major Chinese brands including Oppo, Poco, Realme, and Vivo don't bother entering the US because they don't want to deal with our carrier-dominated sales system. Tale as old as time...