MSFT CY24Q4 Results are in

[ant1pathy]

The rest of the concern is not new to this quarter. The growth of Azure (among other problems) points to Microsoft trying to get out of the business of selling you anything perpetual. Soaking consumers and business alike for subscription based services is like printing money.

I find it frustrating that there's no consideration for the fact that in the current technology space, ongoing server costs and continuous development / updates are kind of table stakes. It's still silly to expect the same kind of "buy once, use it for a decade" model from the 90's and 00's to continue to hold true. That's just not the world we live in now, with every device being on the internet and receiving OS updates. The software that runs on them has to be continuously updated as well. I'm not saying there's no predatory or rent seeking behavior in the space, just pointing out that it's really silly to expect a lifetime of support from a one time purchase.

 

[ant1pathy]

No one doubts that ARM can power a game console. However, games are GPU limited, and GPU performance is an area where even the XBox Series S outperforms Apple's hardware until you reach the SKUs costing thousands of dollars.

Isn't this much more about the decision about where to allocate transistors for the device, rather than anything inherent in the ARM build itself? If the design goal was to spend 70% (90%?) of the transistor budget on GPU, you'd get very different results.