> Microsoft did WinRT or ARM versions nobody really cared. What is the difference?

Commitment. Confidence. Customers.

Apple has committed to Apple Silicon. Flagship products are switching. It isn’t an add-on or side project. That breeds confidence that Apple will stick with it.

That confidence and Apple’s track record make it likely there will be demand for software on Apple Silicon. This is compounded by Apple’s customers tending to be high-income and influential.

Good technical products can be tanked by bad business decisions.

I'd also add history to that list.

Apple made the leap in architecture before (PPC -> Intel) and while painful, they were successful and showed benefits from the switch.

All of the reasons you said are correct, but I want to point out that Windows on ARM is also a bad technical product. The Qualcomm SoCs in devices like the Surface Pro X are more efficient than Intel chips, but they are much slower for everyday tasks even on native ARM-compiled code. Emulated x86 code is even worse, as the slow cores are further held back by Microsoft's emulator implementation. Users may like better battery life, but they also despise waiting for their computer.

Apple Silicon does not make any of these tradeoffs. ARM code screams on the M1, and even emulated x86 code runs with comparable performance to the Intel Macbooks. Battery life is better across every workload. To the user, selecting the M1 over the Intel chip is a no-brainer (except for some edge cases like 32GB+ of RAM, where Apple has largely left the older products in place). This is the same playbook that made the PPC -> x86 transition successful as well.

I think it also must help that a lot of these developers already have a bunch of ARM code running on iOS, so along with Catalyst and I’m sure shared libraries between their existing iOS/Mac apps it was probably easier to get builds out than it could have been.

MS only half-sold their ARM version. It was a clear second-tier product and that x86/x64 was where their heart and customers were.

Apple has made it clear that ARM is, in fact, not a companion product line but the product line. This creates a lot more motivation for developers to do what’s needed to target it because there’s a clear value (for themselves directly or indirectly for their customers).

Because MS always do half the job and call it done (I'm a C# dev btw).

Take Windows for IOT for example: if you read the presentation and the articles you would think it's a viable solution.

I tried to develop a really simple app on it for work. The thing was so slow that I couldn't even make some scrollable text without lag! The same raspberry with Linux is perfectly fine.

If you really want to "understand" Microsoft, just take a look at their UI frameworks: WinForms, WPF, UWP, the javascript one I forgot the name of, and now it's WinUI.

> If you really want to "understand" Microsoft, just take a look at their UI frameworks: WinForms, WPF, UWP, the javascript one I forgot the name of, and now it's WinUI.

The UI framework inside of UWP is just another name for first two versions of WinUI. That JS one you forget the name of was a version of WinUI in the early UWP era, that Microsoft stopped supporting because everyone told them the priority was Electron and React Native (and also because their browser team moved out of UWP/WinUI and over to Chromium). (Unless you are thinking of Silverlight, which was "WPF lite".) WPF itself can be considered a Version - 1 of UWP/WinUI, and today with WinUI 3 allowing you to use many of the controls directly in WPF (and WinForms), further blurring the lines between past/present/future versions of the same XAML-based rendering stacks that Microsoft has been trying to get right for many versions now.

It's fun that they never settle on a strong single brand name, of course, but from a technical perspective there's a definite through line (all the way back to Longhorn's "Avalon" dreams and the original invention of XAML).

Man, what is it with Microsoft and acronyms?

It's so that you need to pay an expensive consultant with the right certifications to explain you all of that ;)

I'm half kidding here, especially when you know that there is a certification about MS certifications (and it's not a joke, the thing is quite complex to the point we don't do this in house).

M1 is the clear future for macOS, whilst WinRT/ARM was a non-committal side-hussle that may or may not have a niche future.

Side hustle is spot on. They didn’t fully commit because they were afraid to cannibalize x86 market support. Unlike Microsoft, Apple made the chip. Microsoft only worked with 3rd parties and nobody would touch Intel/AMD. Well, until now...

It wasn't a side hustle when Microsoft was deep in trying to keep Windows Phone alive.

Yeah it was. They never fully committed the marketing resources and strategy to win in the mobile market. The iPhone simply destroyed them, then android handsets.

Microsoft’s balance sheet made little mention of windows phone or anything mobile/Zune/handheld. It was all enterprise sales, windows licensing, Xbox and entertainment division, services and M&A.

Contrast that with the commitment Apple made to the iPhone.

It's pretty easy to disagree with this. There are shareholders that are still upset at the hundreds of millions spent on marketing and strategy in mobile.

The Microsoft that was worried that ARM was the present/future and Windows needed to be front and center on it, had Windows Phone as a major cross-cutting concern touching every single piece of that balance sheet:

Microsoft made a big play for enterprise licensing of Windows Phone. The last Windows Phone 10 handsets on the market were enterprise sales only devices from vendors such as HP.

Microsoft saw Windows Phone first and foremost as Windows. When Microsoft made that commitment to have Windows 10 running on a billion devices in a short time frame, a lot of their hubris in setting that expectation of so many devices so fast was that they saw a huge growth in ARM devices, especially Windows Phone that never came.

Windows Phone had some of the first attempts at Xbox mobile efforts. The death of a lot of the entertainment division, specifically Microsoft's deeper plays into Music, eBooks, TV/Movies is often directly blamed on the death of Windows Phone leaving Apple too far ahead in pole position on those services.

Windows Phone had big plays from nearly every Service on Microsoft's books. Cortana was built for Windows Phone and the death of Cortana as a front-and-center Services play, too seems to rest on the Windows Phone's shoulder.

Windows Phone was also directly the driver of what most shareholders think to be Microsoft's greatest (ever), most expensive blunder in M&A: the Nokia acquisition.

I think it contrasts directly with the commitment Apple made to the iPhone; had the iPhone failed Apple would have been left with as many scars as Microsoft still seems to have. More than half the Entertainment Division doesn't exist today and Windows Phone is seen as a key reason. The Services team has seen almost exactly as much turnover, again due almost directly to Windows Phone scars. Almost none of the divisions exist in the same form they did today as they did when Windows Phone was the big existential play for the company, the big bet that failed. (If that doesn't show commitment, I don't know what shows commitment.)

It even left scars such that Apple, following in Microsoft's footsteps to ARM on laptop/desktop, years later, seems to get direct credit for things that were Microsoft's efforts. To the very point of the article here and other threads in this discussion, Electron on Apple Silicon would not have happened nearly as fast if it hadn't been for Microsoft's ARM focus/efforts directly forcing Chromium (via the Edge team) to support ARM. (Edge probably wouldn't have switched to Chromium as its renderer if Windows Phone hadn't failed, and if it hadn't needed to spend so much directly in the Chromium codebase in the effort of forcing Chromium to adopt open source ARM builds.)

Neither of the people who have an ARM Surface must have complained.

No, but seriously. The ARM Surface costs $1500, _without a keyboard_, and it's worse than the Intel ones by most metrics. The ARM Macs start at $999 (ignoring the Mini, which has always been a niche product) and come with a keyboard, and they're faster any laptops Apple has released previously, and besides that replace existing popular models. The ARM Macs will shift _far_ more units, probably well over 10x (I don't think MS breaks out figures by unit, but the sales for the whole Surface line are not inspiring).

And besides that, your question gives another clue. Microsoft has actually had two lines of ARM Surfaces; the WinRT-ish ones, and the current ones. With about a five year gap between them. Why bother adding support for something that Microsoft will, based on past performance, probably just kill anyway? Very few shiny new platforms that MS introduces with great fanfare actually survive; see the various incompatible Windows Mobiles, the watch thing, and so on.

>What is the difference?

The fact that there won't be new x86 Macs in 5 years.

I say 2... future us will have to track this bet.

The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that I can make a claim that Apple will stop selling something they deem legacy technology in five years and people will mostly push back against me by saying that five years is too long. If I claimed that Microsoft would stop supporting something in Windows in five years, I'd mostly get jeers.

No need for a bet, Apple said so at WWDC. They started a transition period that will last 2 years.

A difference is Google versus Microsoft because Microsoft finally built it for themselves and is more generous (at least in this instance) in sharing the wealth back to the open source community? Chromium has had open source ARM builds, build pipelines, and CI/CD for a while now since the Edge team made it a priority. Google had no interest in proper ARM builds for desktop Chromium because they didn't want competitors for ChromeOS, so almost all of that has been Microsoft engineers (or so the GitHub statistics indicate). Electron can just reuse all the work that the Edge team already did for ARM on Windows, as opposed to building Chromium entirely from scratch as they would have had to for the original WinRT era.

> I am really curious why the response to Apple Silicon is so prompt vs when Microsoft did WinRT or ARM versions nobody really cared.

Unless I misread your question, it is because the M1 is a vastly superior chip not just to the Microsoft ARM efforts, but also to all the Intel efforts.

Microsoft didn't throw x86 out so there was no immediate need for ports.

I suspect the two major differences are that vendors have confidence that 1) Apple will stick by this decision for quite a long time and 2) Apple will sell a significant number of units with this new architecture.

No effort to make existing apps work on Microsoft’s part, and when done was virtualization and not translation.

The translation of x86_64 to aarch64 is key to making this work well.

And so far benchmarks show that Apple nailed this translation component.