– 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, is it legit? 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. 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. So I’ve been using this laptop
for the past couple weeks, and what is still a trade off. So 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 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. And then, 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. 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 track
pad gestures are pretty smooth, the graphics of the whole UI in general are consistent from full
battery to nearly dead. So using a 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 onboard 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’d 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 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
Lightroom 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 used that don’t support Windows on ARM but do get emulated, so
they still work technically. So 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 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 ’cause adoption’s 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 gonna 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. 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, and a lot of games straight up don’t run, like some of ’em are uncompatible, 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 it’s 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 emulatable ’cause there might be some promises of ARM versions coming soon, or just statements from a developer, I’ve seen lots of those. But just check the programs that you know you’re gonna need to work
because, depending on who you are, you could be totally covered
and fine or totally outta luck. So 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. So here’s a couple more of my observations scattered from my couple
of weeks of using it. 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 track pad with excellent haptics, and just really good
fundamentals all around. 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. 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 2304×1536, 120 hertz LCD touchscreen with that 3×2 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’ve liked to
have seen an OLED option. And then just know that it’s not, like, 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 gonna 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 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. And it’s generally pretty
good at staying cool and not spinning up the fans,
which I also think is great. And then, of course, this is also one of the
very first copilot PCs, so it’s got the dedicated
copilot 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 copilot button to talk to Microsoft Copilot, ask it anything, the same way you’d talk to
Bing or ChatGPT or Gemini. But overall, this laptop
is a good start, I think. I mean, 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, does the software you use work on ARM? Like, that’s the main question
you should be considering when thinking about if you’re
gonna buy one of these things. But yeah, that’s been it, Catch you guys on the next one, peace.