What's Going on with Windows Laptops?

 

What's Going on with Windows Laptops?

A New Era with ARM: The Snapdragon X Elite

Okay, I've been waiting for this for a while. As someone who's been on the sidelines of the Windows game for a little while now and seeing all this hype and this new matte black laptop that's supposed to be generational, it's got me thinking—what's going on with Windows Laptops? Like have Windows laptops actually caught up to the Apple Silicon leap from a couple years ago?

Because this is a new Microsoft Surface laptop 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.

Remembering the Apple Transition

Now, 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 Intel and AMD laptops since then. But it seems like this one has gone way better.

My Personal Experience

So I've been using this laptop for the past couple weeks. You might have seen me with it on the Waveform Podcast, and I've got a pretty good idea now of what's gone well and what is still a trade-off.

Battery Life: The Mega Leap

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.

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. That’s high brightness, web browsing, email, watching videos, research-type activities, and then ending the day at like 40% easily.

So I just really don't think about charging much, which is awesome for a 14-inch laptop. On paper, it's getting compared a lot to the M3 13-inch MacBook Air and it even outlasts it on some synthetic benchmarks, which is awesome. So that's one success—definitely check the box. Great battery life, love that.

Optimized Performance

The other second success that we were looking forward to was just a well-optimized performance. And it's not like the super high-end gaming performance. I'm not talking about that type of performance, but I just mean like a general smoothness and consistency and rock-solid performance across all your everyday regular tasks—that sort of performance.

Now I'm gonna get into app support in a minute, but I basically found this to be a very capable laptop. Again, I've been on the sidelines from Windows for a bit, so I don't have as many reference points, but this is a $2,000 14-inch laptop that can basically do anything I ask of it without breaking a sweat.

Photo editing in Affinity—not a problem. Literally anything in the Microsoft Office Suite—no problem, whether you're plugged in or not. I found the trackpad gestures are pretty smooth, the graphics of the whole UI in general are consistent from full battery to nearly dead. So using software that runs natively on it is snappy and a great experience.

The App Compatibility Dilemma

But that very quickly gets you into the conversation about 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.

When the Mac went through this, there were basically three types of apps:

• Optimized Apps: That's the ideal. All the first-party apps are optimized off the bat.

• Emulated x86 Apps: Built for x86 but work on ARM through emulation—not perfect, but functional.

• Incompatible Apps: Just don't work at all.

So right now for Windows on ARM, you have these three types of apps again, and my assessment is that at this very moment, there's pretty good support for native apps as far as things people use every day. But it's definitely still not perfect.

Native Apps That Work Well

Photoshop and Lightroom CC run native. Chrome, Spotify, Prime Video, Dropbox, Zoom—there's a lot of popular apps across the board that just run natively and they're super smooth and great. They don't hit battery hard at all—love that.

Emulated But Not Ideal

Then there are some apps that I used that don't support Windows on ARM but do get emulated, so they still work technically. Lightroom Classic is a big one. My to-do list app of choice is TickTick—you might have heard of it. I've referenced it a few times and it's a great example. If you go to their website, they only have x86 versions of the app and I downloaded and ran the 64-bit version and it works, but it doesn't actually run very well.

I notice some real chop and lag with certain parts of the UI, and it’s not even that heavy of an app—it’s just a to-do list app.

Apps That Don’t Work At All

There are just apps that straight up don't work at all yet. Arc browser, Google Drive on desktop—I rely heavily on that—that does not have any compatibility at all with Windows on ARM. VMware doesn’t work. A lot of VPNs don’t work. A lot of games straight up don’t run.

Some of them are incompatible, but also a lot of them which might have ordinarily run have anti-cheat software that doesn’t run on Windows on ARM, so the game just doesn’t work at all.

There are even some apps that are compatible, but their websites don’t prominently show the ARM version download. So it's kind of confusing and hard to find. So it's just kind of all over the place right now.

Key Advice

So my take here is: look, 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 emulatable. There might be some promises of ARM versions coming soon or just statements from a developer. But just check the programs that you know you’re gonna need to work.

Depending on who you are, you could be totally covered and fine or totally outta luck.

Surface Laptop X Elite: My Observations

There are a couple Windows ARM laptops out there. This is the one I obviously chose to mess with—the premium matte black one with the Snapdragon X Elite.

Build Quality & Design

I gotta say 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, and just really good fundamentals all around.

Ports

The port selection is all right. It’s still got that full-size USB-A and then there’s two USB-C with the headphone jack.

Display Trade-Off

My only real downside, with it getting as pricey as it can get, is that there is no OLED option. Instead, it’s a 2304x1536, 120Hz LCD touchscreen with that 3:2 aspect ratio. I love that it’s tall. It just can’t quite match the deep blacks and contrast of an OLED, obviously, even though it’s a pretty good LCD.

So I just feel like I basically traded the OLED for a high refresh rate here, but I would’ve liked to have seen an OLED option.

GPU & Gaming Expectations

Just know that 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, it’s a built-in GPU. It’s not gonna be as powerful as a dedicated GPU.

Don’t expect to max out frame rates in "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.

It’s generally pretty good at staying cool and not spinning up the fans, which I also think is great.

Welcome to the CoPilot PC Era

This is also one of the very first CoPilot PCs, so it’s got the dedicated CoPilot button on the keyboard.

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.

Of course, you can always hit that CoPilot button to talk to Microsoft CoPilot—ask it anything, the same way you’d talk to Bing or ChatGPT or Gemini.

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Final Thoughts
Overall, this laptop is a good start, I think. I’ve been waiting personally for a premium built matte black Windows laptop for a while on ARM and this is that—it’s actually what we’ve been waiting for. I think the question really is: what's going on with Windows Laptops when it comes to the apps you use? That's the main question you should be considering when thinking about if you’re gonna buy one of these things.