Samsung Warns That Their New Snapdragon-Based PCs Aren’t Compatible With Fortnite or Some Adobe Apps

Yang Jie and Jiyoung Sohn, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Samsung’s Galaxy Book 4 Edge [sic], which went on sale Tuesday in the U.S., South Korea and some other markets, contains Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. It runs a version of Microsoft’s Windows 11 for PCs that uses technology from U.K.-based Arm.

On Wednesday, Samsung put a notice on its Korean-language product site listing applications that it currently determines are incompatible with the new laptop or can’t be installed. The list included some Adobe software as well as popular games including “League of Legends” and “Fortnite.”

Sounds like maybe Microsoft’s Prism isn’t as good as Apple’s Rosetta 2 after all? Or that Prism isn’t capable of running low-level anti-piracy (Adobe) and anti-cheating (Epic) rootkit-style system extensions?

The issues offer an early hint of the challenges some tech companies may face as they introduce new AI-powered computers and smartphones while seeking to maintain compatibility with existing software.

What an odd paragraph. This has nothing to do with phones, and the only “tech companies” affected are Microsoft, who makes Windows, and PC makers whose machines run Windows and have adopted Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips. Macs made the transition from Intel’s x86 architecture to Apple’s ARM-based Apple silicon without users noticing anything other than dramatically longer battery life and faster performance, including when running x86 software in emulation.

(I put a sic above because Samsung’s new laptops are named “Galaxy Book4 Edge”, with no space between the “Book” and the “4”. Great product name that rolls right off the tongue, as usual, from Samsung.)

★ Wednesday, 19 June 2024