Windows on an iPad?

There’s been a lot of hubbub about Microsoft’s announcement of Windows 365.

Fernando Silva has shared his thoughts about what might be possible when the product is actually released in August. Even from the title of his YouTube video, you get a sense of his priority – running Windows on his iPad Pro.

Obviously, we won’t know the full details and whether it lives up to the hype until it’s released, hits the street, and people kick the tires to see if it really performs.

The promise of having some big kick-butt computer securely working from the cloud and available to you no matter where you are is really intriguing. Obviously, the key to all of this will be a good enough internet connection to make this work.

In my world, the concept isn’t completely new. I go back to the Icon days where we had a server and workstations attached to a server over a local area network. Later on, my district ran a student administration system from a central server using a terminal eminator in the schools. For the most part, these implementations worked well and let to the popular trouble shooting questions:

“Is it plugged in?”
“Do you see flashing lights?”

The promise, in this case, leaves these implementations in the dust. Watching the video, Fernando is excited about the promise that Windows will run so well on his iPad Pro. I do think that his concern about lag is legitimate and could be a show stopper for some if the expectation is that the performance through the connection is similar to actually running an application on a computer.

He makes reference to repurposing old equipment which I think most of us have done. It does seem old-school – I installed Linux Mint on a 2010 Sony Vaio and an SSD in a 2012 Macintosh laptop to extend their lives and both do the job nicely. If all falls into place, according to the video, I could be running Window 10 or 11 instead. The “how” and “how well” remain to be seen.

To be honest, I’m not terribly excited about it personally. Most of what I do these days is done in a browser and then stored mostly in the “cloud” somewhere. I’m quite happy with the status quo. The status quo also says that, if I need more computing power, I need to go out and buy a new computer. Windows 365 seems to imply that I just get a more powerful service for my computing dollars. When I’m done with it, I just stop paying for it.

I’m kind of envisioning the reverse of what I’m doing now. I run an application locally (typically a web browser) and save the documents in the cloud. With Windows 365, I would run the application in the cloud, presumably with very high speed connections, and then download the documents when I no longer need the service.

Will I be watching the release of this in August? You bet. Will I try it out if there’s a free option to temp me? You bet. Do I need it? Nah. Not unless there’s some really intriguing reason and I’m not seeing it. To be honest, I’m not looking very hard at this point.

What about you? Does the concept fill a need that you have?

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