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posted by mrpg on Friday December 09 2016, @05:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-what-customers-have-been-demanding-for-years dept.

Cnet reports: Windows laptops in 2017 could act and feel more like a phone

Microsoft wants its computers to be more nimble.

To that goal, the Qualcomm announced at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Community event on Wednesday that its Windows 10 devices will support the Snapdragon 835 processor, which you'll see in many top-tier phones next year. The chip will be able to provide Gigabit LTE connectivity, nearly double your battery life and pack it all into even smaller devices.

From the following story we get:

At its WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen today, Microsoft announced a range of hardware-driven initiatives to modernize the PC and address two big goals. The first is expanded support for mixed reality; the second is to produce a range of even more power-efficient, mobile, always-connected PCs powered by ARM processors.

[...] The second aspect of the push to modernize the PC is the desire for ever longer battery life, greater portability, and connectivity. To that end, Microsoft is bringing back something that it had before: Windows for ARM processors. Qualcomm-powered Windows 10 PCs will hit the market in 2017.

The truth is that Windows for ARM has never really gone away. The first Windows on ARM iteration was dubbed Windows RT, and it launched on the first Surface tablet. Although this system provided almost every part of Windows, just recompiled for 32-bit ARM processors, Microsoft locked it down using a certificate-based security scheme. Built-in desktop apps, such as Explorer and Calculator ran fine, as did the pre-installed version of Office, but third-party desktop apps built using the Win32 API were prohibited. The only third-party apps that were permitted were those built using the new WinRT API and distributed through the Windows Store.

With few such apps available, Windows RT and Surface didn't see much market success. Nonetheless, Microsoft continued to develop Windows on ARM, as it's an essential part of both the Windows 10 Internet of Things Core variant of the operating system and the Windows 10 Mobile version.

PCWorld offer the following:

Traditional Windows apps can only run on X86 chips, not ARM—thus, the failed Windows RT. To get around this, Qualcomm (and only Qualcomm) is working with Microsoft to emulate X86 instructions, the companies said. [...] Sources at Microsoft and Qualcomm say the partnership is designed around the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, a chip that's in production now and is due to ship in the first half of 2017, according to Qualcomm. The first Windows-on-ARM PCs are expected by the second half of next year.


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  • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday December 09 2016, @07:20PM

    by quacking duck (1395) on Friday December 09 2016, @07:20PM (#439338)

    Apple is falling into a similar trap, but with features rather than UI. A lot of desktop apps like Photos, Pages, Numbers, etc saw features stripped away to allow universal integration and parity with their newer iCloud and iOS versions. It's been an enormous frustration to see desktop apps crippled just because the iCloud and iOS UI don't lend itself well to more advanced functionality (though I hardly consider scaled 1-5 star ratings for individual photos to be "advanced")

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  • (Score: 1) by ilsa on Friday December 09 2016, @09:44PM

    by ilsa (6082) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 09 2016, @09:44PM (#439414)

    Personally, with the exception of Keynote (I don't have sufficient experience with their multimedia apps to comment), the stuff they bundle in the OS were never really that good, IMO. Numbers is clunky and bizarre to use. Pages is... meh. The obfuscated directory file format apple uses is flat out idiotic. You can't email the things without manually zipping them up first.
    I was never happy with Photos, even when it was still called iPhoto. It's flattened mechanisms for dealing with large numbers of images is just a joke. Unfortunately Google nerfed, and then abandoned, Picasa, which is a shame cause I like it much better.

    TL;DR Out of all the bundled apps that Apple provides, Keynote is the only one I consider to function at a level sufficient for general business use, and it's always been that way.