Just don't get them! I have nothing from either Microsoft nor Google on my M1 Macbook Air

Honestly, I don't think Microsoft will be any more successful w/ Windows on Arm than they were back in the day w/ Windows NT on MIPS or Alpha. They had the same opportunity that NEXT had to make the OS and its ecosystem portable, but punted on it. Which is why NEC and later Compaq abandoned MIPS and Alpha. Otoh, NEXT ported NEXTSTEP to x86, Sparc and PA-RISC (albeit just the 32-bit versions), and when they got absorbed by Apple, they parallelly developed OS-X for both PowerPC and x86. Which is why it was pretty trivial to switch to the latter when the G5 turned out to be a power glutton

In fact, Microsoft could have been smart by making their 32-bit Windows carry all the backwards compatibility baggage - win32, win32s, even win16, while making their 64-bit Windows truly portable and platform independent. Since they had the 64-bit Alpha and 64-bit MIPS (since NT never was compiled for an R3000), they could have developed a separate 64-bit Windows for the latter 2, ignoring legacy compatibility altogether, and then developed 64-bit versions of their applications - SQL, Exchange, SharePoint for servers and things like Access and Visio for workstations. Then, whenever AMD64 came online, Microsoft would have just have had to port that to this platform. But they didn't, and lost a historic opportunity

I doubt that we'll see ARM based equivalents of .exe programs

It does support video, which is what probably takes up all that memory. Otherwise their other messaging apps would use nowhere near that

You mean something from the pre-Unicode era? I doubt that /, would support it, since we'd be talking about browsers like Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer....

Doesn't have to be: one can have an FOSS program, compile it to a particular CPU, and then it runs native!

I believe that only some DOS programs ended in .com. Nowadays, it's the most popular web TLD

I have multiple computers, including a Macbook Air M1 at home, and it's great. Have been seeing some YouTube reviews recently that compared that w/ a Macbook Neo, and in most aspects, M1 came out on top. I bought this in 2021, and it's still serving me well

Its only shortcoming is that since it has to be charged via the Thunderbolt port, sometimes when I play games, the battery drains fast even though it's connected to power. Something that my other laptops w/ dedicated power supplies don't run into. Oh, and one more - if I connect my external SSD to it b'cos I want to back up stuff, it's very intermittent in recognizing it. It recognizes USB thumb drives fine, but when I connect my Sandisk SSD to it, it's hit or miss. Nothing wrong w/ the latter, since it gets seamlessly recognized by my Windows laptops

Actually, I was fine w/ every version of Office until Office 2003. Once 2007 came and changed the document formats to .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, I just hated it! But yeah, thinking back, Word for Windows 5 was really good. Don't think I used anything before that version

Only new thing they could have done might have been to produce 64-bit versions of those applications, just so that CPUs aren't compelled to support 32 or 16 bit subsets of their instruction sets

But that's a pretty limiting environment. For instance, I prefer using the YouTube app or the X app, as opposed to running it in a browser (currently, on my ancient Android tablet, I have to run YouTube in a browser b'cos that version of Android is no longer supported by YouTube from the Play store

No, Microsoft applications used to be pretty good in the 90s and 00s. It's ever since Windows 8 and the introduction of the Windows Store that things started going downhill. So maybe they're looking at reviving what used to work?

But if they are really interested, then what they should do is resurrect the old versions of things like Office, Visio,.... that used to run well on Windows 7, and make them available once again. Or maybe make HyperV available on all editions of Windows 11, including Home: then we can run a Windows 7 VM in it, and on that, run those good applications

Just like /. - a site ostensibly tech-centric, does not support IPv6

You beat me to it. I was going to suggest building them on the northern coasts of Canada, Alaska, Norway, Greenland and Iceland. Have fiber-connected submarine networks running to the nearest major cities, be it Utqiagvik, Halifax, Ivato, Oulu.... If Russia ends the Ukraine war and comes off sanctions, they could even be lined all over Russia's Arctic coast, from Murmansk to the Bering Straits

Then two things: they won't be depriving a lot of people of power, since all those places are sparsely populated, and those places going up by 9C won't make their environment insufferable for people who live there