It has more to do with manufacturers than Microsoft. Nobody was making high performance ARM chips, so there was never a market for windows on ARM until now
Windows on arm was a thing, I had a surface 2 rt about a decade ago, too bad it never felt like microsoft ever really fully committed to the idea imo, and yeah x86 apps wouldn’t run on it (though there was an emulation tool apparently, was community developed). Market was definitely there (though I’m not sure how big it was, probably a cross over with netbook users), they just fumbled it like they did windows phone in my view.
…It took them only 4 years to follow the leader this time.
It has more to do with manufacturers than Microsoft. Nobody was making high performance ARM chips, so there was never a market for windows on ARM until now
Windows on arm was a thing, I had a surface 2 rt about a decade ago, too bad it never felt like microsoft ever really fully committed to the idea imo, and yeah x86 apps wouldn’t run on it (though there was an emulation tool apparently, was community developed). Market was definitely there (though I’m not sure how big it was, probably a cross over with netbook users), they just fumbled it like they did windows phone in my view.
…but Apple started making performance ARM chips 4 years ago
And Apple was not selling those chips to Windows laptop manufacturers.
True but Nvidia has been making performant ARM chips (for example, the ones in the Nintendo Switch)