Daylight, Panasonic, and Microsoft

Instruction Set, 2024/5/27

Welcome back to Multicore. This is Instruction Set for the week of Monday, May 27th.

I hope you had a great long weekend if you’re reading this from a country where that was a thing. I spent mine in transit back from Dubai, where I covered the Poco launch event last week. It was my first time there for longer than a layover.

Heck of a place! In many ways it’s strikingly modern even compared to Tokyo, with gorgeous buildings, blocks, and developments that seemingly rose out of nowhere. The food is amazing and the people are welcoming.

On the other hand, it’s maybe the least walkable city I’ve ever visited. Part of that is the 40-degree heat, of course, but the way the gigantic highways carve up the landscape makes it wholly impractical to get around without a car. The subway is pretty good but constantly crowded and not as comprehensive as in most comparable Asian cities.

I might not be able to imagine myself living there, but I did have a good week. I also joined Myriam Joire for an episode of her long-running Mobile Tech Podcast, in case you’d like to hear a travel-frazzled version of me discuss Xiaomi, Microsoft, and more. Myriam and I have been bumping into each other at tech events for well over a decade; she’s awesome, and it was a lot of fun to sit down and chat at length about recent news.

On that note, let’s get into what happened last week.

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The biggest news is Microsoft’s launch of its Copilot+ PC initiative. Microsoft is understandably framing these computers, built on new Qualcomm hardware, as a fresh wave of AI-first devices. But what really matters is that it seems like Windows on ARM is finally, seriously, honest-to-God happening for real.