Probably not. The app will still require that there is a physical window machine somewhere. While using a VM you go not need access to additional hardware
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Microsoft 'Windows App' Offers Access to Windows PCs From Any Device
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If Windows moves to the cloud, what will be the point of spending $$$ on new Intel/AMD CPUs ? Is Microsoft's new strategy going to be potentially harmful to future Intel/AMD x86 consumer sales?
Yes but there's the cost of parallels, $99 per year at least. If the Windows App + experience is less than that, then why pay the parallels tax? (I'm speaking for the masses, of course I know there are edge cases where a local VM will be better than the Windows App).
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Every time I see another way to connect, I see another opportunity to be hacked. While I do like the convenience of having some connectivity between systems, I sure miss some of the simplicity and elegance of being air gapped. I suppose there is always that trade off.
This is just a jazzed up version of RDC. It still has the cost having and maintaining a separate windows computer. And if this will be an Office 365 component/add-on it will have it own subscription costs. If you have already have windows machine and are maintaining anyways it might be an interesting alternative but so is the current RDC. And I don’t see tons of people using RDC as an alternative to natively hosted VM.
The biggest advantage is the Mac could be a lightweight machine with a bare amount of RAM and SSR capacity (AKA a cloud client) Most everything else will be cloud based or use the capabilities of the remote window machine.
That’s my 2 cents, for what it’s worth
If no one has mentioned it yet, look at https://remotedesktop.google.com. It's free, fast and light, and backed by as much google 2FA as you have enabled. Works on Linux, Mac, and Windows interchangeably.
I still miss “Back to My Mac” for us it worked near flawlessly. It worked better than the options of the day (Team Viewer, etc.)
You can already use VirtualBox, etc. if your main concern with Parallels is cost. I imagine for many, it is not.
And this — at least if you rent through Windows 365 — is not an alternative in that case anyway: that service starts at $31 per user per month. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/business/compare-plans-pricing
Microsoft Remote Desktop has been available on macOS for years as a native Universal app and on both iOS and iPadOS. Conceptually this is nothing majorly new. A rebrand and a few extra connectivity options, that’s all, some of which just look like easier ways to connect to services that you can connect to with RDP. All good.
You’ll probably need to log into a Microsoft cloud account to connect whereas the vanilla remote desktop can connect directly to your machine over the Internet if you know the IP address and set up a bit of port forwarding.
It’s just another way from Microsoft to earn monthly income and gather more private data on us.
Wow 18 days since I predicted the future of home computing would be entirely cloud based and here we are, already heading in that direction.
Yep. You can tell from the version number and some of the UI that this is not a new app.
(Nor are the subscription services new.)
These things come and go. In the 1970s, the old Unix time-sharing stuff was basically that — you had a "terminal" that was a screen + keyboard but didn't do local computing. In the 1990s, Sun had a vision of "network computing". Then it gets called "thin clients".
And yet… users keep finding that, actually, having local compute resources comes with its advantages as well.
Does virtualbox even support windows on ARM on Apple Silicon? And at $31 a month for a Windows App, it certainly won’t supplant Parallels anytime soon. Thanks for that. I like Parallels, I use it all the time. Maybe the threat of competition (from Microsoft) might result in lower prices, perhaps we’ll see.
There is an Apple silicon beta Test Build of Virtualbox that is available for download
Testbuilds – Oracle VirtualBox
Well, or UTM.
(I haven't really looked into it in a while, since I'm reasonably satisfied with Parallels Pro.)
Yeah. If all you want is a "run some Windows-only apps" solution, you're probably cheaper off buying a $500 desktop and shoving it in a storage closet. Then use "Windows App" to connect to it.
RDC has caps locks issues that come from the shift key with no fix, a documented issue. It has has major resolution matching issues. And it has trouble with accessing remote drives as well as maintaining fonts and printers.
Nope - but you can find it on internet. Note; read carfully what they are planning to do, if they find over their ki out, that you do something they don't agree with.
TBH, the answer is pretty much the same as it would be for any spreadsheet that is not Excel - while it will probably do 90% or even 99% of what Excel will do, the 1% to 10% that it doesn't do is often a deal-breaker for a lot of people - particularly people who do more than just build simple spreadsheets with formulas.
In my case, for just one example, Excel does the following which, as far as I am aware, there is no equivalent in OpenOffice (note, while these are all different things, they are all the same theme - third parties have written extensions to Excel which don't work in other spreadsheets):
1) It interfaces directly with our company's ERP system for both pulling data for analytics and for making mass updates to data where needed (for example, we added a new field to track on customers - were able to open our customer list in Excel and update them directly without having to do an export->change->import process).
2) We are able to use @risk to do monte-carlo simulation within Excel directly.
3) Our financial analysis, reporting, and budgeting tool (called Solver - this is different from the "Solver" tool that comes with Excel) runs within Excel. This is also part of our ERP (it's an external piece, but integrated directly within the ERP). Our managers are able to access a budgeting model where they enter their respective budgets throughout the year, and they are then able to pull down financials related to their departments in real time, all within Excel. Our senior executives are able to see the company financial performance against the overall budget via a web application, again, in real time.
Aside from third-party support, the other major difference with Excel is simply that Microsoft dumps a huge amount of R&D into improving Excel, with quite a number of new features being introduced with every major version. Many of these features are the "holy crap, why didn't they come up with this before?" variety, and are now features that are in wide use today (and which I personally use very often). A few that come to mind that are fairly new (as in, came out in the past 5 or so years) include FlashFill, XLOOKUP, OData connectivity, PowerQuery, and tighter integrations into PowerBI. Some of these may exist in other spreadsheets, but many of them don't.