It has long been said that from 1973 to 1983, the American automotive industry was stuck in a rut that is now referred to as the Malaise Era. This period of time, marked by some of the most underwhelming, gutless, depressing cars ever to come out of the United States, was bookended on the frontside by the energy crisis and the need for manufacturers who had focused purely on displacement and horsepower to shift their thinking to focus instead on efficiency, at a time that “efficiency” may as well have been a word from a foreign language to them. To compound things, emission controls added to vehicles beginning in 1974 pushed vehicle performance even further down, while often actually compromising fuel economy!

Looking back on this era as a car fan, most cars coming out of Detroit were incredibly depressing, underwhelming, and unmemorable.

So why would I bring this up on a blog where I normally talk about computing or technology topics? Because I believe that we’ve now firmly entered the PC Malaise Era. (I want to highlight right now that when I say PC in this post, I mean “Windows PC”. If I say Mac anywhere in this post, you’ll know I mean Macs.)

Windows and the Neverending Pursuit of Moar Power

From the earliest versions of Windows through Windows 7 (arguably most intensely with Windows Vista), Microsoft pushed and pushed the technical boundaries of computing, repeatedly asking for more memory, processor power, and eventually graphics processing power with each major revision of the OS. PC manufacturers repeatedly responded by opting for faster and faster Intel processors (eventually adding multiple cores), more and more RAM, and incredibly powerful graphics processors.

But during this “muscle computing” era, most vendors and most customers weren’t thinking at all about saving energy; even laptops shipped with comedically large, high wattage power adapters and ludicrously large batteries. (During the development of Windows Longhorn, we had to rely on high-end gaming laptops to deliver decent enough performance for customer-facing demos.)

With Windows 8, Microsoft’s single-minded focus on tablet computing pushed the PC platform physically towards tablets – but the lack of software that was a) optimized for touch and tablets, and b) optimized for a decent trade off of energy and performance led to an OS that failed to ever get off the ground.

As we look at Windows 10, things have shifted. Microsoft has focused the OS in more intensely on performance and battery life. Arguably they’ve gotten the OS closer to the silicon than they ever have before, and the Surface devices have surely helped with that. Still, the lack of applications optimized for the platform, and lack of halo applications (no, not like the game) that truly pull the platform forward and make it something that consumers come to the platform for.

Defining Malaise

Now, this new PC Malaise Era isn’t “malaise” in the sense of the original era. There, we were gifted with these gutless wonders – cars that, regardless of the cubic inches, delivered mind-bogglingly low performance figures. In this PC Malaise Era I’m suggesting, the opposite is actually the case; Intel’s single-minded focus on performance and clock speed for decades leaves us with a default PC platform that is great with power, particularly when plugged in. But consumers want thin and light devices that don’t waste energy, get hot, and burn up their battery while doing nothing but standing by.

To me, we are in a PC Malaise Era due to four specific conditions:

1. The inability of Intel to deliver processors that deliver a great harmonization of energy efficiency and high performance
2. The beginning push of ARM-based processors into the mainstream computing realm, in the form of Apple silicon.
3. The lack of compelling energy efficient halo applications on Windows to pull consumer desire for the platform forward
4. The lack of PC computing devices that push the platform forward overall.

Intel Processors and The Stop of the Tock

For years, Intel iterated their processor architecture using an iterative tick/tock process. An initial tick release would typically push the processor architecture forward, and a following tock release would iterate on that tick, refining the story. Then the process would repeat.

However in 2016, Intel shifted away from this approach to a slower three-stage iterative process, architecture, and optimization approach.

Intel, long-focused on displacement, is now challenged to make processors that are energy efficient thoughout the day (particularly when running Windows and legacy Win32 applications), delivering performance when needed, and intense energy efficiency the rest of the time.

ARM Processors and the big.LITTLE Mix

ARM-based processors, particularly now with the introduction of Apple silicon, are now entering mainstream computing. The approach of using an ARM processor for a ”computer”, whether an Apple silicon Mac or Qualcomm-based “Windows on ARM” PCs, is still fraught with challenges for consumers, as there’s no guarantee any legacy application from one platform’s Intel architecture OS will run on their ARM-based computing devices.

Regardless of the architecture, the future appears to be based around an approach initially coined by ARM as big.LITTLE. A hybridized blending of high-performance cores and energy efficient cores, in concert with an OS designed to exploit them and applications tolerant of this platform flexibility, allows devices to deliver performance when pushed, and energy efficiency when standing by and running in the background. A big.LITTLE approach is a <ahem/> core tenet of Apple’s latest processors, the A14 for iOS/iPadOS, and M1 for Macs.

Intel has talked about, and earlier this year introduced, their own approach toward “hybrid cores”, which will be available in 2021. But Apple’s notable lead, particularly now with the introduction of M1-based hybrid Macs, puts Intel even farther behind in the… tortoise/hare potato sack race of blended/hybrid computing, which could eventually allow Intel PCs to push performance when needed and deliver energy efficiency the rest of the time. But this is a brass ring that has, personally, seemed repeatedly elusive for Intel to grab.

No PC Halo Applications

I wish I could point to a bunch of applications that consumers and businesses just can’t live without, that blend the Windows 10 application development APIs, touch optimization, and energy efficiency. I wish I could point to a few of them. But, frankly I can’t. There’s no killer app on Windows that isn’t an old Coleman stove… a crusty old Win32 app you pull out of the garage when you need it on your new PC, but it’s not the reason why you buy a new PC. Even Slack and Teams, the supposedly must-have business applications in business, are both based on the bloated Electron runtime, not on Windows 10-native tooling that could deliver the best experience for the platform.

PC Platform Stagnation

Finally, much like Detroit during the automotive Malaise Era, it feels like as OEMs struggle to create devices with a great blended mix of performance and power conservation, they’re also struggling to deliver… anything new or innovative. Even Microsoft’s Surface devices have fallen into a pretty predictable iterative cycle, with little new or innovative to show for it, perhaps excepting the ARM-based Surface Pro X, which suffers from the lack of x64 application emulation, and poor battery life when used primarily with x86 applications. (Admittedly, if you need x86 or x64 applications most of the time, an ARM-based PC isn’t a great idea.)

So how do we escape this PC Malaise Era?

I’ve said before that Windows has never escaped x86. I’m still not sure if it ever can. So the challenges then come down to three things:

A) Can Intel succeed where they’ve failed for the last 5+ years, at building hybrid processors? The next year to two years should answer this question.

B) Can Microsoft succeed at finally getting application developers to write platform-optimized, energy-respectful, halo applications for the PC? I’ve been writing about the Windows Store for a long, long time. A long time. And I’m still not sure how Microsoft can light a fire under Windows application developers when they’ve lost that mindshare.

C) Can Microsoft begin pushing the Surface platform forward again? This one’s completely up to Microsoft. I’ve seen the rumors of the next Surface Pro… and it’s more of the same – evolutionary, not revolutionary.

I guess we will see in the next 3-5 years whether Intel can cross this chasm; if they can’t, then the future likely belongs to ARM, and that future will likely mean less and less to Microsoft, outside of running classic Win32 applications on x64/x86 Windows.