Start at 3:10…down 20% and they are going to focus on “higher margin products”…where does that leave GO/Laptop, etc…maybe Surface Pro and Studio will “continue” for a while…
It’s all cloud, all AI, all the time - I can hear Frank “Fly me to the moon…”
That’s been their strategy for a while now.
The first order of business’ was eliminated everything with an alternate OS, which in the commercial sphere was the Hub 2S and Laptop SE. The Hub is changing operating system/experience and the Laptop SE is Dead.
Pro 9 and Laptop 5 are the top money makers so they are getting most of the sales focus.
As far as the rest of the Product line, the Go, Laptop Go, and Studio lines I feel do have a bit more like left in their product lines.
The biggest mystery if of course why Microsoft keeps pushing ARM. They sell terribly. If they saw any kind of sales increase with the Pro 9 5G, it was likely accidental orders from people thinking it was an Intel Model. But given Microsoft going all in on Ai, that seems justification enough to keep ARM going.
From the engineers we talk with, they still believe it’s the future either as potentially a higher performance option in the long run, or a more power efficient option even now or just as importantly an alternative to Intel, or likely a combination of all those things.
Two other data points to this. One is that they told us the Pro 9 5g outsold in the first six months, the entirety of production of the Pro X and that it continues to sell well relatively speaking (about 30% of the overall Pro sales).
Second and something that often gets overlooked is that MS has “gone all in” so to speak with their backend 365 infrastructure with already about 30% running on MS own custom ARM based designs. And the anticipation is that will only increase as the custom designs are significantly more energy efficient which among other things, helps with MS “green” goals
Do you think Nadella and Panay use SP9? Nah, they have Neos…
Woah, are these the predecessor chips to the rumoured ARM processors Rubino famously dismissed as “bullshit” and “bafflingly stupid”.
Honestly, I think Rubino just likes picking fights with the internet.
I tend to ignore Rubino for multiple reasons, but from my understanding work on these backend ARM designs started shortly after Facebook started building theirs and it’s my understanding that there is ongoing debate within MS when/if to bring them to the consumer side.
However I’ve also heard that they are even more “RISCy” in that they are optimized for backend server tasks and power efficiency and may not be so stellar as general purpose CPUs