Welcome to Brown’s Bytes! Your weekly insight from Mobliciti’s CTO Andy Brown. Follow #brownsbytes
27th May 2022
Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of the M1 powered Apple Macs and have mentioned before how Apple had got ahead of Microsoft when it came to processing power and battery life.
Rewind back 18 months and you’ll see I also did a piece about how I thought Microsoft would respond to this. In particular, since Windows has been able to run on ARM for years now… Microsoft should really be in the lead but is instead lagging years behind.
So, why am I bringing this back up??
This week Microsoft has been holding their Build 2022 conference and one of the things revealed is ‘Project Volterra’.
18 months ago I made the point that Microsoft had to encourage developers to compile their applications for ARM-based CPUs if they were going to make the most of ARM-based Windows machines.
Volterra is precisely this! It’s an ARM-based development machine with Visual Studio ready to go, any similarities to a Mac Mini are a complete coincidence!
It’s taken a while, but this is what is needed to trigger the cycle of transition, Apple did precisely the same thing back in 2020 with something they called the Developer Transition Kit (an ARM Mac Mini for developers to use to get their Applications ported from Intel to ARM).
But note – that was June 2020… so you now have a time-based measure of how far Windows is behind on ARM… 2 years behind.
And power consumption is not just a laptop battery issue anymore
ESG has made it to the top of the agenda in every organisation we speak to. The shift to ARM isn’t now just about battery life, the power consumed by all the devices in an organisation is a significant chunk of the overall carbon footprint. Moving to more efficient CPU technology could reduce this massively, the Mac Mini M1 consumes three times less power than an equivalent Intel Mac Mini!
Maybe time to consider Mac again?
Mac as an option is creeping into many Enterprises, maybe it’s time to consider it more widely? We’re here to help if you want advice on how to best get Mac out there and how to secure and manage the Mac estate.
Or you can wait a few years for Microsoft to catch up!
I’m being deliberately provocative here, think how much power you may have saved in 3 years!
Get in touch if you’d like to know more.
