Microsoft has a really fundamental problem. Whatever work was done on Windows 10X is now expected to be folded into Windows 10 as well. Microsoft eventually declared it would phase out Windows 10 S, citing customer confusion, in favor of an “S Mode” that would similarly restrict applications but otherwise be part of Windows 10. Coverage of Windows 10 S almost always focused on its limitations rather than what Microsoft hoped to do with it.
Like Windows RT, it couldn’t run Win32 x86 applications, only apps downloaded from the Microsoft Store (albeit for different reasons). Windows 10 S was intended to be a restricted version of Windows 10 that would appeal to the education market. Several years later, it tried a different approach. Microsoft has never entirely given up on the idea of a lightweight version of Windows. When they couldn’t, they returned it in droves. People bought Windows RT expecting to be able to run x86 Windows programs. The Surface RT ran Windows RT, an ARM variant of Windows 8. The Surface RT had several flaws, but the most significant, at least as far as consumers were concerned, was the lack of x86 compatibility. When Microsoft launched its original Surface products, one of them was an ARM device, the Surface RT, built around Nvidia’s Tegra 3.
