There’s a (relatively) new OS eating market share and a new CPU architecture.
COMPUTER OS MARKET SHARE PC
It’s clear now that the long period of tranquility in the PC market through the 2010s, where nothing much interesting happened, was less a terminal decline and more of a pause. Microsoft wants to have other business segments to talk about by the time Chromebooks are truly carving into its market share. Microsoft’s own decision to transition away from defining itself in terms of Windows and towards a cloud-centric future makes a lot of sense in the face of numbers like these. Four years from now, it could be a very different story. It’s the CPUs on drawing boards today that’ll be defining the performance market 3-4 years from now. Today, of course, all of this is theoretical, but that’s how the semiconductor market works. Its also worth mentioning that macOS is the second most popular OS on desktop devices, holding 17.76 percent of the global market share: macOSs desktop market. Windows, of course, will remain its own titanic force - nobody expects the OS to just collapse - but it’s clear that Intel and AMD would be fighting over a shrinking pie if the two companies can’t maintain Chromebook market share.
COMPUTER OS MARKET SHARE SOFTWARE
They’ll focus on Chromebooks, where x86 enjoys a performance advantage but lacks a four-decade software library to anchor it. When they do, they won’t necessarily focus on Windows, where the entrenched software market makes beating x86 as hard as it could possibly be.
But if ARM CPUs show a sustained ability to beat past x86 chips, we’re going to see more chip designers interested in entering that market. x86 CPUs are currently the preferred Chromebook solution for anyone who wants a higher-performing system, and that’s not likely to change in just the next year or two. Any such CPU is still a few years away, best-case. To be clear, all of this presumes that a company such as Qualcomm, Samsung, or Nvidia will build an ARM CPU core that can compete with x86. That allows ARM and x86 to fight on more even terms. Chromebooks don’t carry the same expectations around legacy software support that a Windows laptop does.
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