What developments are occurring with Windows laptops?
Windows laptops actually caught up to the Apple silicon leap from a couple years ago because this is a new Microsoft Surface laptop 7, and it doesn't have an Intel chip inside it doesn't have an AMD chip inside this laptop has a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip inside meaning it is an arm laptop
years ago Apple went through this transition from Intel chips to arm chips and it was crazy successful like no one could really match their efficiency and seamless integration the vertical integration the overall package of their laptops just took a Quantum Leap Forward now Windows laptops around the same time actually if you remember kind of tried the same thing I don't know if you remember the Surface Pro X that didn't go so well and so we've continued to have in an AMD laptop since then but it seems like this one has gone way better
the big Advantage the mega Quantum Leap Forward was inefficiency which in a laptop with the same size battery means a dramatically improved battery life and this laptop absolutely got a big bump up so I remember reading reviews of the last surface laptop with an Intel chip which already had a pretty solid battery life and the Microsoft quote was 19 hours this one's quote is 23 hours but what that's translated to for me basically is all day battery life for mixed use with no worries like that's high brightness web browsing email watching videos research type activities and then ending the day at like 40% easily so I I just really don't think about charging much which is awesome for a 14-in laptop
The laptop, priced at $2,000, provides a smooth and consistent performance for everyday tasks like photo editing and using Microsoft Office Suite, even when unplugged. The trackpad gestures are responsive, and the graphics remain consistent throughout the battery life.
the downside of switching to arm this is what I was curious about repeating from last time and this actually happened in the Mac world too when they made this transition the number one difficulty to changing the entire architecture of your computer is actually app compatibility so I remember when the Mac went through this there were basically three types of apps there's obviously optimized apps at the top of the list like that's the ideal obviously all the first party apps are optimized off the bat and apple did a lot of work trying to get as many developers on board as possible to get their apps optimized on arm but then there were apps that were built for x86 but would still work on arm through emulation so they not perform necessarily as well as they could but at least they worked anyway and then there were apps that just didn't work at all so right now for Windows on arm you have these three types of apps
if you are at all considering a Windows arm laptop specifically look up the apps that you have to use and make sure they're at least compatible at least emulat cuz there might be some promises of arm versions coming soon or just statements from a developer I've seen lot of those but just check the programs that you know you're going to need to work because depending on who you are you could be totally covered and fine or totally out of luck so there are a couple Windows arm laptops out there this is the one I obviously chose to mess with the the premium matte black one with the Snapdragon X Elite
The build quality is pretty awesome as they have been with surface for a little while now I love the all metal design The keyboard's Rock Solid big trackpad with excellent haptics just really good fundamentals all around the port selection is all right it's still got that full-size usba and then there's two USBC with a headphone jack my only real downside I would say with it getting as pricey as it can get is that there is no OLED option so instead it's a 2304 X 1536 120 HZ LCD touchcreen with that 3x2 aspect ratio and I love that it's tall it's just it can't quite match the Deep blacks and contrast of an OLED obviously even though it's a pretty good LCD
it's not like a super high-end gaming PC it's very strong in performance across the board it'll do all the other things but similar to Apple's M Series Laptops like it's a built-in GPU it's not going to be as powerful as a dedicated GPU so don't expect I mean you can still play some games sure but you're not getting this laptop to max out frame rates and Elden ring or something if you study the benchmarks enough you'll find that these chips have a lot of cores but weaker individual performance on like a single core basis so it's good at throwing a lot of cores at tasks and getting things done and that's nice just note that and it's it's generally pretty good at staying cool and not spinning up the fans which I also think is great
this is also one of the very first co-pilot PCS so it's got the dedicated co-pilot button on the keyboard and so yeah this chip has an npu which does specific AI related processing things like the studio camera effects that are built into the camera or the forced artificial eye contact in the camera and it'll do it without pulling anything from the CPU or GPU and of course you can always hit that co-pilot button to talk to Microsoft co-pilot ask it anything the same way you'd talk to Bing or chat or Gemini but overall this laptop is a good start
I think the question really is does the software you use work on arm. let me know what you think of the surface laptop of the whole windows on arm thing I'll check out the comments.
