What If Snapdragon X Marks the Spot … for Chromebook? (Premium)

It's probably not surprising that my recent MacBook Air M3 triggered a rabbit hole of conjecture about coming Snapdragon X-based Windows laptops. But what about ChromeOS? Isn't this lightweight personal computing platform an even better match for this intriguing new family of Arm chips?

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that Snapdragon X could transform Windows on Arm from an also-ran into a mainstream solution and provide the foundation for a new decade of PC use. But I also have concerns and fears based on too many years of experience and too many disappointments. And while Snapdragon X seems to address the hardware-based disappointments of the past, there are still some concerns on the software side of this equation.

These concerns are part of a much broader topic, a topic I've been grappling with since the web and then mobile devices transformed the industry. Many years ago, I voiced these concerns in the form of a semi-rhetorical question about which outcome was more likely: Microsoft simplifying Windows, its complex legacy platform, or Apple (at the time) making its simpler iOS mobile platform more sophisticated?

The history since is messy. Microsoft has tried to simplify Windows in more ways than most remember, with Windows RT, Windows 10X, S mode and Windows 10 S, Windows 11 (albeit all surface-level), and so on. Apple has steadily improved iOS, splitting off iPadOS as a semi-independent fork, and adding laptop capabilities. And ChromeOS, which started off as the simplest-possible platform, has expanded with Android and Linux app compatibility and more premium hardware experiences. No clear winner has emerged. Today, Windows PCs, iPads, and Chromebooks are all viable product lines, but none has replaced the others. We are, in many ways, in the same place we were 10 or 15 years ago or more.

I feel strongly that simplicity wins in the end, but I sometimes have to remind myself that those simpler platforms—iPad and Chromebook—are offshoots of far more complex, legacy platforms too. The iPad came out of the iPhone, obviously, but that came out of Mac OS X, which was itself based on the Mach kernel and UNIX. And Chromebook, likewise, is a stripped-down version of Linux, originally designed to host the Chrome web browser. Point being, simplicity can grow out of complexity, like a flower can grow out of a pile of dung. It just has to be done correctly.

Microsoft's attempts at simplifying Windows, alas, have not been successful. And it is perhaps instructive to study these attempts to understand why that is so. These missteps explain why Windows is what it is today, and why Microsoft only has Windows whereas Apple has Mac, iPhone, and iPad and Google has ChromeOS and Android.

In Windows Everywhere and the article series that it sprung from, I make the case that the history of Windows as a platform can be seen as a series of reactions. And one of the most visceral of those reactions occurred in 2012, when Microsoft rele...