Writing in his bog he said that from 1973 to 1983, the American automotive industry was stuck in a rut that is now referred to as the Malaise Era.
"This period of time, marked by some of the most underwhelming, gutless, depressing cars ever to come out of the United States, was bookended on the frontside by the energy crisis and the need for manufacturers who had focused purely on displacement and horsepower to shift their thinking to focus instead on efficiency, at a time that “efficiency” may as well have been a word from a foreign language to them. To compound things, emission controls added to vehicles beginning in 1974 pushed vehicle performance even further down, while often actually compromising fuel economy,"
He said that the same situation applies to PCs. Until Vista, Microsoft pushed and pushed the technical boundaries of computing, repeatedly asking for more memory, processor power, and eventually graphics processing power with each major revision of the OS. PC manufacturers repeatedly responded by opting for faster and faster Intel processors, eventually adding multiple cores, more and more RAM, and incredibly powerful graphics processors.
At the time most people didnt think about saving energy and even laptops shipped with comedically large, high wattage power adapters and ludicrously large batteries.
"As we look at Windows 10, things have shifted. Microsoft has focused the OS in more intensely on performance and battery life. Arguably they’ve gotten the OS closer to the silicon than they ever have before, and the Surface devices have surely helped with that. Still, the lack of applications optimized for the platform, and lack of halo applications (no, not like the game) that truly pull the platform forward."
Miller said that the PC Malaise Era is due to the inability of Intel to deliver processors that deliver a great harmonization of energy efficiency and high performance. He sees problems in pushing ARM-based processors into the mainstream computing realm, in the form of Apple silicon. There is a lack of compelling energy efficient halo applications on Windows to pull consumer desire for the platform forward and PC computing devices that push the platform forward overall.
Intel, long-focused on displacement, is now challenged to make processors that are energy efficient thoughout the day, particularly when running Windows and legacy Win32 applications, delivering performance when needed, and intense energy efficiency the rest of the time.
ARM-based processors, particularly now with the introduction of Apple silicon, are now entering mainstream computing. The approach of using an ARM processor for a ”computer”, whether an Apple silicon Mac or Qualcomm-based “Windows on ARM” PCs, is still fraught with challenges for consumers, as there’s no guarantee any legacy application from one platform’s Intel architecture OS will run on their ARM-based computing devices.
"Regardless of the architecture, the future appears to be based around an approach initially coined by ARM as big.LITTLE. A hybridized blending of high-performance cores and energy efficient cores, in concert with an OS designed to exploit them and applications tolerant of this platform flexibility, allows devices to deliver performance when pushed, and energy efficiency when standing by and running in the background. A big.LITTLE approach is a <ahem/> core tenet of Apple’s latest processors, the A14 for iOS/iPadOS, and M1 for Macs", Miller said.
There are too few Windows programs which consumers and businesses just can’t live without, that blend the Windows 10 application development APIs, touch optimisation, and energy efficiency.
"There’s no killer app on Windows that isn’t an old Coleman stove… a crusty old Win32 app you pull out of the garage when you need it on your new PC, but it’s not the reason why you buy a new PC. Even Slack and Teams, the supposedly must-have business applications in business, are both based on the bloated Electron runtime, not on Windows 10-native tooling could deliver the best experience for the platform", Miller said.
He said that he feels like as OEMs struggle to create devices with a great blended mix of performance and power conservation, they’re also struggling to deliver… anything new or innovative. Even Microsoft’s Surface devices have fallen into a pretty predictable iterative cycle, with little new or innovative to show for it, perhaps excepting the ARM-based Surface Pro X, which suffers from the lack of x64 application emulation, and poor battery life when used primarily with x86 applications.
Admittedly, if you need x86 or x64 applications most of the time, an ARM-based PC isn’t a great idea.