After Apple successfully "re-engineered" its Mac lineup with the Arm-based Apple Silicon processor and gained market support, Microsoft is apparently also planning to expand its presence in the Arm architecture market. In its upcoming Surface product planning, Microsoft may be planning to merge the Surface Pro series, originally designed exclusively for x86 processors, with the Surface Pro X, designed for Arm processors, into a single product line. This means the new Surface Pro series will offer processor options from Intel, AMD, and Arm architectures.
Merging products originally designed for different architectures will simplify product complexity for Microsoft, and even allow them to share the same structural design, thereby reducing product production costs and speeding up product market entry.
If nothing unexpected happens, the new Surface Pro 9 expected to be launched in the second half of this year may see such a product positioning adjustment, which also means that there will be no additional differentiation of Surface Pro X series products in the future.
After Apple successfully used the Arm architecture to create the Apple Silicon processor, significantly improving the battery life and heat performance of Mac series models during operation, while also enabling higher computing performance, Microsoft, which originally maintained a long-term partnership with Intel and AMD, has also continued to attempt to restart the use of Arm architecture processors in recent years and has deepened its cooperation with Qualcomm to enable the Windows operating system to run natively compatible with the Snapdragon processor hardware environment.
However, compared to Apple's complete abandonment of Intel processors, Microsoft still maintains a multi-processor development model. Therefore, it will not abandon its long-term cooperative relationship with Intel and AMD just because it starts to adopt the Arm architecture computing model.
