Intro:
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.
Thinking, is it legit? Like, have Windows laptops actually caught up to the Apple Silicon leap from a couple of 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, meaning it is an ARM laptop 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, but that didn’t go so well. So we've continued to have Intel and AMD laptops since then, but it seems like this one has gone way better. I've been using this laptop for the past couple of 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. So the big advantage, the mega quantum leap forward, was in efficiency, 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. Like, 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.
Basic:
So, that's one success—definitely check the box: great battery life, love that. The second success we were looking forward to was just a well-optimized performance. It's not like super high-end gaming performance, I'm not talking about that type of performance, but I just mean like a general smoothness and consistency, a rock-solid performance across all your everyday regular tasks—that sort of performance. Now, I'm going to get into app support in a minute, but I basically found this to be a very capable laptop.
Now, 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.
You know, 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 the software that runs natively on it is snappy and a great experience, 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.
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.
Features:
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. So, okay, Photoshop and Light room CC run native, Chrome, Spotify, Prime Video, Dropbox, Zoom—like there's a lot of popular apps across the board that just run natively, and they're super smooth and they're great.
They don't hit battery hard at all, love that. So then there are some apps that I use that don't support Windows on ARM but do get emulated, so they still work technically. So, Light room Classic is a big one. My to-do list app of choice is Tick Tick, 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 actually notice some real chop and some 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. And there's a long list of apps in this sort of limbo phase where you don't necessarily know if there's going to be an ARM native app around the corner or not.
CPU adoption is not super high, it's not really a huge incentive for them to make one yet, but you can still use it, it's just not going to be the ideal experience. It might churn through battery a little bit quickly, but it still works. But then there are just apps that straight up don't work at all yet, like Arc browser.
Google Drive on desktop, I rely heavily on that, does not have any compatibility at all with Windows on ARM. VMware doesn’t work, a lot of VPNs don’t work, and a lot of games straight up don’t run. Like, 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. And there’s even some apps that, actually, now that I think about it, are compatible, but their websites for the companies that make them don’t actually highlight or prominently show the download for the ARM version, so it’s kind of confusing and hard to find.
So it’s just kind of all over the place right now. 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 emulated, because there might be some promises of ARM versions coming soon or just statements from a developer—I've seen a 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.
Conclusion:
So, there are a couple of 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. So here’s a couple more of my observations scattered from my couple of weeks of using it.
I’ve got to 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—just really good fundamentals all around. The port selection is all right. It’s still got that full-size USB-A, and then there are two USB-C with the 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 120Hz LCD touchscreen 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.
So I just feel like I basically traded the OLED for a high refresh rate here, but I would have liked to have seen an OLED option. And then 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, 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.
