About a week or two ago we discussed what apple silicon or
apple on arm means for developers today we're switching gears just a bit and
discussing windows on arm stick around
hey everyone welcome back to today in tech I'm Juliet Beauchamp i'm here with
info world senior writer Serdar Yegulalp as well as Computerworld contributing
editor Preston Gralla thank you both so much for joining me
and like i mentioned we're going to be discussing
what windows arm is really entailing for developers and why it's slightly
different than apple silicon so my first question to you both i'm
just going to hand it off right to you is
what is windows on arm who is it for and what devices are currently
using it um i'll start off windows on arm is pretty much what it
says windows for arm devices now there's a long somewhat sad history of
windows unarmed because the first version of it was called windows rt that
was based on the windows 8 operating system which was one of the worst
operating systems microsoft has ever built and windows rt
did something remarkable made that operating system worse the
problem with that device was that it only ran what microsoft
called metro apps which are sort of this new generation of apps that
hope that the world was going to go to and abandon desktop apps also called
windows 32 app so that did not go over well it kind of
faded away eventually though microsoft decided to
keep windows and arm so today it does exist it's really a niche
operating system it's really essentially for devices that
are like chromebooks that's the basic idea then
they're not going to be powerful they can capably run
desktop apps if they're 32 bit desktop apps
but they can't run 64-bit apps and that's problematic
mainly because you never know when you download whether it's going to be the 64
or 32-bit version sometimes you know sometimes you want but these are
basically chromebook devices like the surface pro x
um lenovo has an app lenovo yoga 5 i think it's called
um oddly enough these devices even though they're chromebook-like they're
web first as microsoft says they're not they're very expensive
windows for x for example nine hundred seventeen hundred dollars very very high
price for essentially what's a glorified chromebook and that's basically windows
and arm it's a side show for microsoft not like apple it's not like the whole
you know the whole ecosystem is moving it's just a small
niche market not a big market for microsoft basically they just want to
have skin in the game as far as what devices like this mean
for developers it's really kind of paradoxical because um
developers themselves are used to working with reasonably high-end
machines to get their work done so if you spent the same 900 or a thousand
dollars on one of these machines which means just kind of astonishing for what
amounts to a chromebook if you took that same amount of money
and you spent it on a machine it's more developer and oriented like one of
lenovo's machines you'd have something much more powerful
that would run the full gamut of windows software
32 and 64-bit you wouldn't have all of the the silly restrictions
that would come with with running arm and you'd have a better machine overall
so as far as what it means for an individual developer they're almost
certainly not going to buy one of these devices themselves to do
any any actual development work the only reason that they would want to
have one of them at all would be for the sake of checking the compatibility of an
existing application even that might be a moot point as we'll go into that a
little bit later so for for devs owning one of these
machines working with the windows on our machine is pretty much a non-starter
i'm curious preston perhaps this is a question for you as sort of more of our
windows guy here but if it seems like there's not much
benefit in using a windows on arm device what's
kind of the point
uh if we had microsoft here we could ask them maybe they could tell us
i really think it's almost a kind of insurance policy i don't think they're
really that serious about it i i think it's really like i said before to have
skin in the game just in case and you know there is a
possibility that there could be a real reason for these devices to exist the
world is not just going mobile the world is
going remote and um you know if you could get a
reasonably priced device that's inexpensive that will run
windows software the first of all web stuff that's the most important thing
and you know there is office there's really nice online versions of office
it's not for professional writers let's say
professional people who are going to do a lot of data work with excel but for
most people typical office workers you could run those you know they're
really pretty good so i could see a potential future
but right now with the prices and right now with chromebooks being strong
i honestly don't really know why they're still doing this
there was a piece that jason perlow at zdnet wrote a couple of weeks ago that
has some points in it that i think i agree with about why this was introduced
and where it might be headed and you said it might be an insurance policy
um that coincided with some of the things that he was talking about about
the idea that since we're not only going mobile we're
also going cloud first and so what microsoft may trying to be
create with one of these devices is essentially a cloud first uh windows
device instead of instead of running the vast
majority of your stuff natively you run it in emulation on a cloud
machine and you have it streamed to that device
and microsoft has been talking about doing basically
streamed remote versions of windows and on azure for some time now
not just as a server thing but also as you know individual uh
virtual desktops so you know and that's actually something they've already
they've already offered as a service and this is just a further this could just
be further refining that but again um when it comes to actually having one
of these things for their own sake um if you're going to spend 800 or 900
you might as well spend it on global machines so i don't see this really
having much of a significance until the prices are
on a par with chromebook or for 900 bucks we get something that is just
uh you know impossible to have anywhere else but right now
if i spend 900 bucks i can have it all anyway yes sir
you know you're right and and you're especially right about the insurance
policy i think that's really what's right i mean
given the pandemic given global warming and we know there's bigger storms coming
given all that uh the world the future is certainly even the present is remote
but the future will probably even be more remote and microsoft basically
basically when people think of microsoft they think of windows but the truth is
microsoft is now essentially a cloud company and so sadar you're
absolutely right that you know running things through the
cloud this could be the way to get into it but
of course like you said the prices have to drop and now that i think about it
you know there's also that much more movement towards giving
developers um remote hosted cloud-hosted resources that they can use in a remote
way you know coding in the browser for instance or having a browser-based
coding environment and they're not terrible they're
actually coming along pretty decently they're
they're not bad at all as long as your your your
your style of work fits nicely into what's being offered but you know this
just being the first generation of that i imagine there's a lot of improvement
to come so there may well be something for the
developer here too as this whole business of you know using
cloud hosted resources and and web hosted resources
to do coding start to mature further
so i'm wondering too and this sort of brings me to my next point
what's the situation with applications for
both developers and maybe even a bit on the user side you've mentioned that
on these windows on arm devices you can pretty much only use the 32-bit
version so is it worth it to be using a really intensive
application on a windows on arm device or how should developers go
about making sure their applications work is it worth it
sort of that's probably something you can change about if it's if all you have
is a standard 32-bit version it's not a terrifically intensive
application if it's not photoshop for instance
then microsoft has already taken steps to show that
it will run as is an emulation it may not necessarily run
at the speed that you would expect from having a full
x86 device but it will run but for the for
for applications like photoshop like i mentioned anything which is really cpu
intensive you're absolutely not going to get the
same experience at all and the other question
that comes from this is is it worth it to recompile one's applications
to target arm because of that and while the amount of work is is not
necessarily trivial it's it all depends on the size of the
application so the larger the application and the more complex it is
and the more cpu intensive that is to run it on daily basis
uh the less of a the less of a return you're probably going to get on your
investment because you're not your application is not even
necessarily going to be targeting the people who are going to be using
that hardware in the first place so it's probably not worth it for the most part
if you have an existing win32 you know the standard 32-bit version of
what of what you're offering and you don't really you're not interested in
putting in the time the resources to port it because there's just no audience
there then they can just run it as is and they probably
they'll probably just you know live with with the performance degradation for the
time being and you know um microsoft there there
have been a lot of reports saying that microsoft is going to be working or has
been working on getting 64 apps to run
um on arm and if that's the case then then that
sort of makes the issue mood i think for a lot of developers although as you said
there'll probably be a performance hit and um and these devices probably aren't
going to be running high powered applications anyway and you know the
other thing about it is that apart from the technical side of it i'm
just thinking from a business side of it microsoft while at one point it
basically owned the world when it came to developers they had to
develop for windows or they were dead it's been many many many many years
since that's been the case developers really have ignored microsoft
for many years and uh you know these days you're
primarily writing for mobile operating systems and so it's
hard for me to imagine a real business case for many
developers who um recompile for arm or
you're targeting the back end you're targeting basically a server environment
you're running java or you're running a number of the other
cloud-based languages you're running something like go which
is very portable across even across environments and across
uh you know across platforms so there the emphasis on targeting windows as a
development environment has really only made sense when the vast majority of the
stuff that we were running only ran in the desktop and i'm
consistently impressed by the number of things that can be
that can be done in a web browser you know with with certain restraints
um imposed on the end user but it really isn't the same world as before and
developers haven't been targeting the win32 desktop as their as their first
place with the sole exception of things like
gaming which admittedly is a is a huge market but it's also you know
one very specific almost custom market that
really doesn't have anything to do with with
business computing as a whole in terms of what it's targeting and why
you know and given that arm is really um at least windows owner is really built
to run via the cloud really it's not pointed at
um at client applications that's just one more point that
that agrees with you're saying siddharth it's it's really you know you
develop the the web app i mean why bother to go to a client version if it's
going to be for an armed device so it sort of feels like what you guys
are perhaps saying or maybe i'm curious to hear it in in
your words is is it worth it for developers to be
focusing on windows on arm yet and when will it become or when should
it become a priority i think right now
the simple answer is no and that it won't even become
something to be worth considering for at least six months to a year
because the ecosystem is still totally new the hardware is just barely arrived
and also like we've been saying the general trend in terms of in terms of
software usage and software development has been away from the confines
of the desktop system people are buying pcs
a whole lot less than they used to and they're using them a whole lot less than
they used to as their primary systems the use cases have narrowed considerably
but the people that do use them they do tend to use them pretty religiously and
for for you know for things that they just can't
get anywhere else if you're doing video production for instance
if you're doing software development um if you're doing
anything involving uh graphics you are generally
going to have to use a pc or nothing and that really i think is the main reason
why it's not worth it is because at this point so much of what we have done has
just moved away from the desktop in general
yeah i agree and actually i'd be really surprised there may be a developer here
or there who could find a real reason to do it but i think it's going to be
hard to find one who wants to do it for you know business reasons
not just a year out but two three four it's hard for me to imagine
imagine it happening again i think that's the past
there's just so many specific things about um
the way that the web works as an environment now that has allowed this
like it's now that much easier to store data large amounts of data locally
in a browser and to work with it um that it was even even five years ago because
of the you know the apis that are available in
your average web browser to do exactly that
and these are things that have all made it that much easier to take
an application that could previous that was previously only a desktop
application make it that much more of a web application so
it's also because web technology has has grown tremendously and has become
really a kind of a platform independent runtime all of its own
fantastic well thank you both so much for joining me before i let you both go
do you have any closing thoughts on windows on arm or
you know wish list do you wish it would happen i
don't know any closing thoughts for um both of you
uh uh yeah one just to reiterate everything at least that i've said and i
think sir has said also to a great extent um you
know there is um these devices are built for the web
because of that it's not likely that there's going to ever
be a real reason for developers to get serious about developing
specifically for them they could probably just develop for the web
and they'll hit the target for these devices
the other thing that strikes me about them is they are
really designed to take advantage of something that
that arm has been trying to offer people which is you know the
tremendously reduced power consumption over intel even the most
low power of intel processors the idea is that you would get
that much better performance for that much less power consumption in general
and i love the idea of a windows-based device that will run
literally all day without me having to recharge
but if the trade-off for that is that i have to throw out everything that i use
day-to-day in the first place then it's not really a starter but if
i'm one of these people that has only just started
computing and all of the computing that i only know about is done through a web
browser anyway then it's not as big a sacrifice
so for someone like me it's really not going to be very appealing there are
still things that i have to do on a desktop because
they're just not offered anywhere else in five years though that could be
completely different so you know for now i'm saying this is really not
the thing for me but i'm going to give it a couple of years and see what
happens because i could be really surprised
great well thank you both so much for joining me once again
and if there's any sort of updates you know perhaps sooner than five years
i'll definitely make sure that we have both of you back on to recap
so thanks so much and thank you all so much for watching this episode of today
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do you have any questions or comments about windows unarmed please leave them
in the comments below and i'll get back to you or i'll get
back to you on serdar and preston's behalf
thanks again for watching and i'll see you next time
you