I don't think MS needs to push this if they want to succeed, they need to start making a consumer friendly machine that Windows runs fantastically on.
For an "acceptable" laptop, the price point is already pretty close to $1000, and before I would have a tentative recommendation of MacBooks/Macbook Airs because of the learning curve of MacOS. With M1/M2 and how much better it is than anything else on the consumer market, I openly recommend it to anyone in the market for a new consumer machine. Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine.
I was discussing this with a colleague last night, but the M1/M2 chips and complimentary hardware let Apple do some amazing stuff out of the box without adjustment that Windows simply has no answer for. The integration of the complimentary hardware with the M1/M2 chips is so strong that I stumbled onto features I completely missed announcements on, and it legitimately "wow'd" me.
- Live Text caught me off-guard while drag/drop-ing an image to a chat app. I couldn't stop testing its limits and reading the dev docs
- I took surprise calls from really crowded + noisy places and was in disbelief that my call partners couldn't hear anything but my voice in crystal clear quality
- I ran games and software that just weren't possible on Intel Macs through Rosetta at pretty fine FPS/quality without incident
- I didn't need to change a single program from my workflow
Microsoft can likely do the same but they need to put the legwork in to make it happen. Personally I understand they have no interest in this and it makes sense -- they want you on Azure with your server workloads and this keeps the lights on at Microsoft, and as best I know the consumer market (not considering gaming) still favors Windows. But I guess that's why projects like this confuse me a lot since it must be a pretty substantial RND and manufacturing cost, neverminding advertising, but Microsoft doesn't seem to have their heart in it.
It's not about backwards compatibility - consumers don't need to keep Windows 3.0 apps running, not a statistically significant portion anyways, they just need modern apps to run fast and well, long battery life on portable devices, quiet machines, and that's it, but seems that this just isn't something Microsoft is interested in taking over.
I really can't think of Windows features in decades that "wow" so much as you just know what you get with Windows regardless of the version in terms of basic features; what worked on Windows XP probably works on Windows 11, but even that is starting to erode in a slow and painful way. There are quite a few programs on Windows I get the impression that Microsoft just doesn't want me to be running, but things like the Windows Store, Windows' implementation of security for unsigned apps, etc, these all feel like Microsoft isn't confident enough to fully invest into these new features or to drop them in order to advance.
Microsoft definitely has the talent and cash reserves to pursue a strong consumer laptop to compete with Apple; for whatever reason, they don't seem to have the interest though for consumer devices. Probably the simplest reason is the server market is theirs and this is plenty of money, but I just can't get why they continue with such forays then.
Edit: just elaborated on price point for consumer laptops and recommending machines.
