Microsoft is releasing a version of the Mac Mini that is designed for developers to build native Arm apps for Windows 11. The Windows development kit will be available in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the US. Anyone can buy a miniature Windows on Arm machine, even if they're not developers.
The Windows Development Kit is powered by a platform called the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. There are four ports at the back and two at the side, as well as a Mini DisplayPort and anEthernet port.
The Neural Processing Unit on this device is similar to the 5G Surface Pro 9 which will allow developers to run hardware-accelrated machine learning tasks. Voice Focus is an impressive background noise removal feature that doesn't hit your computer's processor or graphics card.
The software will be the most important part of the kit. A full toolchain of Arm native apps is in the works. .NET 7 will include improved performance for Arm, and the new version of Visual Studio will run on it. There are also previews for the Arm versions of the two software programs.
More apps, tools, frameworks, and packages will be arriving over the coming months, according to Pavan Davuluri. Thanks to Windows 11's powerful emulation technology, developers will be able to run unmodified x64 and x86 apps and tools.
The native Arm versions of Microsoft Teams, Office, Edge, and OneDrive will be included in the kit. We can finally see more apps run on Arm-powered laptops if this device encourages Windows on Arm app development.
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