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Windows RT Could Make a Comeback

Posted by timothy on from the well-that's-a-low-bar dept.

SmartAboutThings writes: Windows RT has been a terrible flop for Microsoft, but it seems the company isn't yet ready to totally abandon the concept. There's now speculation that Microsoft is working on Windows 10 RT, as mentions of the 'new OS' have been spotted inside of Device Guard which is a new security feature for Windows 10 Enterprise that scans a program for a digital signature, and determines whether it's trusted or not. Judging by its name, the OS should not be confused with proper Windows 10 that we see on Microsoft's mobile devices, as Windows 10 RT is a version of the OS that is designed for the desktop class PC and tablets.

15 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. belgium by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

    If it combines the good features of both it won't exist.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. NFL can use them by jfdavis668 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The NFL can use them to prop up their iPads like they used to.

  3. That word, I don't think it means what you think.. by krisbrowne42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Comeback would suggest it ever really arrived... I think the safer terms might be "Pathetic return" if you're trying to track reality, or perhaps "heroic but futile attempt" if you really are a MS booster.

  4. Windows CE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Forgive me for being unfamiliar with Windows RT and CE, so perhaps this is a dumb question. What's different between Windows RT and Windows CE? I was under the impression that Windows CE was a decent (or at least successful) OS for mobile devices.

    1. Re:Windows CE by Junta · · Score: 5, Informative

      Windows CE (colloquially 'wince' as in the reaction you have to dealing with a device running it) was an entirely separate beast from other Windows.

      Windows RT was an ARM build of Windows 8. The thought being that these fancy ARM devices were everywhere, and MS could get a slice of the pie if they just could run on it. Hence the push to 'Universal' apps with a cross-platform runtime so that simple applications would work equally well on ARM and x86 customers. Problem for MS being that Windows isn't that exciting without the legacy software library. Also, Intel made some progress towards appropriate devices for the tablet space (mostly lagging now on radio technology, but not all tablets need direct WWAN capability). In a tablet form factor, the screen dwarfs any delta between a contemporary energy optimized Intel versus ARM.

      Basically, Intel and MS get the most benefit out of each other. MS without Intel is not exciting, and Intel isn't particularly well positioned under 10W TDP, except if the user needs to run Windows.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:Windows CE by alexhs · · Score: 2

      What's different between Windows RT and Windows CE ?

      I would say that WinCE is designed to run native applications (like iOS), while WinRT is designed to run .net bytecode on CLR (like Android running Java bytecode on Dalvik.

      --
      I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
    3. Re:Windows CE by Lisandro · · Score: 2, Interesting

      MS without Intel is not exciting, and Intel isn't particularly well positioned under 10W TDP, except if the user needs to run Windows.

      Intel's Core-M chips (aka Skylake) are impressively competitive and average around 4.5W. I bought a Zenbook a while ago expecting to give it some light web browsing use and it is my main travel gear right now - lightweight, fanless and powerful enough to code in.

    4. Re:Windows CE by Solandri · · Score: 3, Interesting

      WinCE became Windows Mobile (this was back in the PDA days when Palm was the main competitor), which became the starting point for Windows Phone.

      Windows RT was a port of the Windows API from x86 and AMD64 to ARM. People erroneously refer to it as a flop. Yes it was a flop in the market, but it succeeded at what it was intended to do - to allow Microsoft to hedge their bets.

      Back when Microsoft began working on Win RT, mobile devices had just become the fastest growing computing sector. Nobody knew what the future held - if Intel/AMD desktop and laptop processors would continue to dominate, or if ARM processors were going to erode away their market share until ARM became the dominant player. Despite Microsoft's long relationship with Intel, they were a software company so didn't really have a horse in the race. Consequently they hedged their bets. The created both Windows 8 and Windows RT. Developers could then write their programs to a single API. Regardless of which processor architecture won, they would just be one recompile away from having a functioning Windows program that would run on contemporary computing devices.

      Basically Microsoft threw Intel in the way of the ARM bus, telling Intel that if they wanted to continue to be the CPU that Windows ran on, they'd be solely responsible for making their CPUs competitive with ARM processors. That's a large part of the reason Intel has been concentrating so heavily on Atom and ultra low voltage Core processors lately - so they could compete with ARM in power consumption, and prevent ARM processors from spreading beyond the phone/tablet market into the laptop and eventually desktop market..

      Intel was mostly successful, so Win 8 became dominant and Win RT was tossed into the dust bin. If Intel had failed, Win RT would've become dominant and Win 8 would've been put into the dust bin. Microsoft made both knowing one of them would fail. They just didn't know which one ahead of time.

    5. Re:Windows CE by slew · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In my opinion, Microsoft stacked the deck against Win RT (to Intel's benefit). Although Win RT was a port of the WinAPI, you couldn't develop for it unless you were a professional developer. I was just about to buy a WinRT machine, until I found out Msft *disabled* the capability to write WinAPI apps in their released WinRT (it was present in the beta version).

      They apparently did this under the guise that they wanted to force developers to write "Metro" apps that would work on their tablets, rather than port WinAPI apps to WinRT. Had WinRT been able to run more WinAPI apps (than office), one might make the argument that Microsoft was all in for WinRT, but as it turns out Microsoft was just all in for WinPhone/Metro. WinRT was a crippled afterthought (kind of like WinNT for DecAlpha). There was no way WinRT would ever become dominant because Microsoft's focus was on WinPhone instead.

      Intel simply placed their bet: Linux datacenter, Win8 for server to desktop to low-end laptops, and Android for mobile. Microsoft placed their bets on Win8 for high-end to low-end laptop, and WinRT/WinPhone for mobile... Intel basically used Microsoft's Win8/WinRT segmentation as an opportunity to create a firewall around the remainder of their low-end PC laptop business and spent their time "investing" $2B+ money in their mobile Android business against WinRT/WinPhone.

    6. Re:Windows CE by cbhacking · · Score: 2

      There are jailbreaks for both Win RT 8.0 and 8.1 that will let you run Win32 (what you call "WinAPI") programs on RT, either your own or any of a body of ported (mostly open-source) software. You can also run .NET programs - they don't even need to be recompiled, if they target .NET 4.x, since that's already on RT and .NET binaries are intermediate code - and of course programs written for any of the ported runtimes (Python, Perl, Ruby, sort of Java, etc.).

      There's even a (very unofficial, but I think it's open source now) program that provides a binary compatibility layer for legacy Win32 x86 apps, using dynamic recompilation and shim libraries that thunk Win32 APIs from the x86 program to the ARM host operating system. This avoids the need to run an entire x86 copy of Windows on top of RT, though this is technically possible too. It's sort of like OS X's "Rosetta" feature from when they were switching from PPC to x86. The compatibility isn't great yet, and the performance probably never will be, but it's usable for some apps and supporting others is often just a matter of getting the shim libraries written. Not bad for something hacked together from bits of open source software and Windows header files in a few hackers' spare time.

      Of course, all of this is utterly unofficial. Microsoft broke the 8.0 jailbreak with 8.1, and has patched the 8.1 jailbreak (but you can easily skip that patch, or roll it back). It really highlights how much MS was shooting themselves in the foot, though; Jailbroken RT tablets are cheap Windows PCs with great battery life, and just happen to run on a different architecture. Since recompiling is often just a matter of changing the target platform in Visual Studio and hitting Build again, RT could easily have had a substantial library of software, and the compatibility program (which Microsoft could have put a lot more resources into than a few folks on XDA could spare) could have filled in the gaps.

      But noooo, then somebody might have actually used it for something useful. Much better to just write off a $900M loss on the thing...

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
  5. Re:I suspect this is more for IoT devices. by space_jake · · Score: 2

    I kind of figured they'd be doing something like RT for the future Xbox consoles. Just a PC that can only run Windows approved app-apps.

  6. Please Kill it... by ArcadeNut · · Score: 2

    along with Silverlight...

    --
    Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
  7. May be the Windows RT 10 shell update by Stonent1 · · Score: 2

    A while back they said they were working on a UI update for Windows RT that would give a lot of the look and feel of Windows 10 but on RT devices. The OS would still be Windows 8-RT but the UI would be like Windows 10. Though I don't see a whole lot of difference between Windows 10 for phones and RT.

  8. Windows RG by blavallee · · Score: 3, Funny

    My favorite version, Windows RG

  9. Re:shitty story by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's an even shittier story than that. Windows RT was a real OS. It had powershell, win32 support (although only for signed applications), it had true multi-user sessions, true multi-tasking and windowing ... it was just the ARM compile of Windows 8 but wouldn't allow applications installations without a Microsoft certificate. Arm Windows 8 is as real of an OS as Ubuntu for ARM is also a real OS.

    But what's really stupid is that it's not gone. Windows 10 Mobile is already an ARM build of Windows 10. With continuum it's got mouse and keyboard support etc. If you turn the zoom way down on the dpi settings the browser pops into desktop mode because it thinks it's running on a PC. Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 Desktop are even on the same build version now. So Windows RT didn't go away it's just hiding inside of Windows 10 "Mobile" aka the ARM compile of Windows 10.