Microsoft has been working on Windows 10X for several years. The consequences of this activity could be noticed even by uninitiated users last year, when in classic Windows 10 the original icons began to be replaced with new ones, respectively prepared for Windows 10X. To make the entire Windows platform visually consistent. The popular phrase had to be nothing more than an attempt to visually distinguish “X” from the classic version without X.
The new icons appealed to 27% of our readers, 31% of readers were disappointed and 42% were putna. The new icons were followed by modifications to the Start menu (they appealed to 27% of our readers, disappointed 37% of readers and 37% of readers did not lose their veins as well). As you can see today, the Windows 10 icon innovation launched last year, initiated by Windows 10X development, is still in its infancy.
The paradox is that while icon updates are still running, the development of Windows 10X itself shows no similar zeal. The operating system, which was originally designed for dual-screen mobile devices (a luxury device, with a price segment of around $ 2499 announced), Microsoft decided to re-evaluate last spring and focus on low-cost devices, competition for Chromebooks.
The decision was accompanied by the abolition of Surface Neo’s own laptop (above), which was to be the flagship for $ 2499. We won’t be evaluating whether there used to be an egg or a hen (that is, the abolition of Surface Neo or the re-evaluation of plans with Windows 10X), but there are two possible reasons why these changes occurred. The Covid-19 pandemic was often mentioned last year, but that does not seem to be the real cause. Many products and news have been postponed for a few months, but none for a year or more just because of the virus. On the contrary, the market strengthened and customers bought everything mobile, so mobile news would have an increased chance of success.
Two reasons may be more likely, one of which concerns the software configuration and the other the flagship hardware configuration. The software lies in the fact that Windows 10X should not support Win32 applications. This may not bother some users, but you can imagine the reaction of a user who buys a Windows device for $ 2499 and finds that after the purchase they don’t even run applications that work seamlessly on a netbook for $ 199.
The second, hardware reason, may be related to the decision to use SoC Lakefield from Intel. It combines one large processor core Sunny Cove (used eg in processors Ice Lake) with four small nuclei (Atoms). A combination of not very ideal core energy efficiency Sunny Cove combined with the previous generation of Intel’s 10nm process, which was accentuated by the lack of support for HT (only one thread) and AVX instructions, had no positive effect on performance, and when Windows added a scheduler that was not well prepared for something similar, it was the result single-core performance at the Atom / Celeron level and multi-core performance at the Pentium level.
With software compatibility worse than a $ 199 netbook, the performance page would be at the level of $ 199- $ 299 netbooks. All for $ 2499.
The abolition of Surface Neo (after its postponement in the spring of 2020, Microsoft deleted it from its website in the autumn of 2020) and the reassignment of Windows 10X from high-end to low-end, but another change is coming. According to available reports, the release of this operating system has disappeared from Microsoft’s roadmap for this year (2021) and it seems likely that the project has been canceled. Such a scenario is quite possible – if we realize that Windows 10X lost the primary element that explained its existence – specific support for dual-screen mobile systems – there are no specific reasons why this OS should the user.
The position of Windows 10X against Chromebooks seems like a marketing mistake, because the main reason why a user can prefer Windows over Chrome OS is software compatibility, which Windows 10X (lack of support for Win32 applications) does not offer. Why ask Windows in such a situation? Although it is said that you will not enter the same river twice, Microsoft has in fact got into the same (or at least remarkably similar) situation with Windows as with Windows RT almost a decade ago.
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