- What goes in to an Always Connected PC?
Windows 10 on ARM, right?
Actually there's a lot more to that,
and today we're gonna tell you about its history
and why it's not really new either,
why it's not all about ARM.
Stay tuned.
(techno music)
All right so in late 2016,
Microsoft announced on stage
its Always Connected PC initiative
with the idea behind it was Windows 10 on ARM
was really the big deal there
as for the first time, well not really,
unless you count Windows RT,
but for the first time,
we're gonna have true Windows 10 on ARM
and it's gonna be able to run win32 applications
without having to be specially recompiled.
So that was kind of the big deal
and since then Windows 10 on ARM
has been associated with Always Connected PCs
and on this channel that's what we've talked a lot about.
I also should be pointing out that in May 2017,
Intel came out and said
they're gonna support eSIM technology
and this was gonna be part
of Microsoft's Always Connected PC initiative
and then AMD and Qualcomm came out in December 2017
and said hey, we're teaming up as well
to basically take on Intel in this area.
And so Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm,
are all now part of Always Connected.
Some people made this sound like,
well Microsoft didn't trust Qualcomm,
it was bringing Intel and AMD into the picture,
but it's not really the case.
In fact, the term Always Connected
is not really a new concept for Microsoft.
So going back to Windows 8,
there was a thing called Connected Standby,
which was then renamed to InstantGo in 8.1,
and then there was Modern Standby for Windows 10,
and now we have Always Connected.
Now all these things are related
by the fact that it's this concept of a PC
that is always on, but not always on.
And so it's about power savings, right?
The idea behind like an iPad tablet
where you can always leave it powered on
or your smartphone but doesn't need to be shut off
in order to save battery life.
Now Intel has struggled a lot with this problem
and Microsoft's been trying to solve it for a long time.
In fact, if you're a really big fan of Windows,
you may remember going back to Vista over a decade ago,
and a thing called SideShow.
It was the secondary display that ran on top of the laptop.
The idea behind it was you can check the notifications
and check your latest emails
without having to open up the laptop
and connect to your network.
So Microsoft's been trying
to figure this out for a long time.
Intel has been getting better with it
so going back to Windows 8,
you could do things like stay connected to a network
while the laptop was in standby.
Later on that became disconnected,
so you can have a disconnected version of that
where it was connected to the internet
but you could still reach things like Cortana,
and it's been evolving ever since.
Now I would say that Intel is still
not nearly as good as Qualcomm.
There is still a significant difference here
and so equating the two is not really fair.
Qualcomm, you can literally leave on
in a standby state for weeks or even months
and hit that button it will turn on instantly,
whereas Intel devices still eventually need to go to sleep.
And you can check this on your laptop pretty easily.
In fact on any laptop, if you type in CMD in command
and then type in powercfg /a,
you can see the states that your laptop supports.
If it supports Connected Standby,
you'll see the network setting there
and you'll see that now my X1 Carbon which has LTE built in.
You can also see it on the Surface Pro with LTE,
and of course any device running Windows 10 on ARM
but other laptops like my HUAWEI MateBook X
do not support this state 'cause there's no LTE connection,
so it goes in to a permanent standby.
My point here is that this isn't really new concept,
so Always Connected is just the next iteration,
the next evolution of it,
specifically bringing on Windows 10 on ARM.
Now as to why Microsoft is actually pushing this idea
and there was a big announcement
besides the Qualcomm support,
it's this next evolution of where the Workplace is going.
And you can read all this,
it was written in a white paper recently
called Accelerating the Move to the Cloud
With Always Connected Computing.
In this paper, Microsoft details how a lot
of companies are moving towards the idea of an LTE network
than moving all of their systems to cloud-based networks.
And in order to fully leverage that,
you need laptops and tablets and these devices
that are always connected to a network.
LTE gets you that.
They also mentioned the fact
that LTE networks have been dropping in price
and becoming more widely available.
In fact there's this new idea
that you can actually set up private LTE networks,
they're just for your workplace.
then there's the idea of IoT, the Internet of Things
which won't rely on WiFI.
If you're flying a drone around,
you don't really need WiFI so much as LTE networks
which reach further and are more reliable
than standard WiFI networks,
which can be expensive to both maintain and deploy.
So anyway go read that paper as it really explains
why Microsoft is pushing Always Connected PC.
While there is the consumer angle,
it's more about the idea of users
who need to be always connected to the internet
and companies who are connecting more
to a cloud-based network system
and the future that it entails.
But in the end, Always Connected PC is not just ARM,
so think of it as Intel,
and we should see AMD Ryzen processors
running with Qualcomm X16 modems,
coming to the market as well.
So it's gonna be really all of the companies involved,
and that's really exciting.
I still think Qualcomm-based systems
will be better than Intel for battery life,
instant-on, in size and thinness
but Intel definitely plays a role here as well,
as we've seen with Surface Pro and soon to be Surface Go.
So there's a quick look in to the history
of Always Connected PC and why it's not really new.
Leave me a comment below and tell me what you think.
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Thanks for watching, take care everybody.