To be fair, the Surface Pro 11 ARM is really good. It's the best actual computer in a tablet form factor I've ever used. iPads and Android tablets are crippled by their OS, and x86 tablets are bulky, hot, underperform, and/or have poor battery life.
Performance of every day tasks on the Surface is excellent, it sips power, and Microsoft has done a great job with their x86 emulation layer (Prism). Most x86 apps (including games!) work without any involvement from the user. In the few cases I ran into issues, tweaking the emulation settings for the app fixed the issue, and I think there was only one app that refused to run, though I don't remember what it was right now. Performance even with emulation is pretty good.
This experience is light years ahead of Windows RT, and even Windows on ARM from a few years ago.
So I don't think Microsoft's interest in ARM is waning anytime soon. They're clearly heavily invested in it, and the hard work has been paying off.
Agreed, I got the Surface Pro 11 to have a Windows on ARM device to test on, and it's quickly become my favorite portable device. It's really nice to have a tablet that lasts days on battery, that you can draw on and then flip around and write code on.
The last thing I was waiting on was Zed, which now works on Windows ARM as of a couple weeks ago (though there aren't official builds yet so I build it from source).
Hate to hand it to Microsoft but it's just a really versatile and powerful device.
Performance of every day tasks on the Surface is excellent, it sips power, and Microsoft has done a great job with their x86 emulation layer (Prism). Most x86 apps (including games!) work without any involvement from the user. In the few cases I ran into issues, tweaking the emulation settings for the app fixed the issue, and I think there was only one app that refused to run, though I don't remember what it was right now. Performance even with emulation is pretty good.
This experience is light years ahead of Windows RT, and even Windows on ARM from a few years ago.
So I don't think Microsoft's interest in ARM is waning anytime soon. They're clearly heavily invested in it, and the hard work has been paying off.