Windows on ARM: Microsoft Surface Laptop Performance and Compatibility

The new Microsoft Surface laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip offers exceptional battery life and well-optimized performance, but app compatibility on Windows on ARM remains a key consideration.

### Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio: A Windows on ARM Experience
* 💻  The Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio is a premium Windows laptop powered by a **Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite chip**, marking a **significant move away from traditional Intel and AMD processors**.
* 🔋  One of the standout features of this laptop is its exceptional battery life, with Microsoft claiming **up to 23 hours of use on a single charge**, offering **all-day battery life for mixed use scenarios**.
* ⚙️  Performance-wise, the laptop is described as **very capable for everyday tasks**, with **smooth operation and consistency** across various applications, including **photo editing** and **Microsoft Office Suite**.
* 📦  However, the main challenge with Windows on ARM devices is **app compatibility**. While many popular apps run natively on the platform, there are still limitations with some x86 apps that need to be emulated, and others that are **not compatible at all**.
* 🖥️  The laptop's build quality is praised, featuring an **all-metal design**, a **solid keyboard**, a **large trackpad with excellent haptics**, and a **good port selection** including **USB-A and USB-C ports**.
* 🎮  It's important to note that the laptop is not designed for high-end gaming, as its integrated GPU is not as powerful as dedicated graphics cards. It is more focused on **general performance and efficiency**.
* 🔍  The device also includes a dedicated **co-pilot button** for AI-related tasks, such as camera effects and interacting with **Microsoft's co-pilot feature**.
* 💬  The overall verdict is that the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio is a good start for Windows on ARM devices, but potential buyers should **carefully consider app compatibility** before making a purchase decision.

[Music] 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 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 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 in an AMD laptop since then. But it seems like this one has gone way better, 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. 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-in laptop. On paper, it's getting compared a lot to the M3 13-in 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 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-in laptop that can basically do anything I ask of it without breaking a sweat, photo editing in Infinity, 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. So right now for Windows on ARM, you have these three types of apps. Again, 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 use 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 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. CU 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. Um, 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 them are

incompatible, but also a lot of them, which might have ordinarily run, have anti-che 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 that 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 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 premium matte black one with the Snapdragon X Elite. Um, so here's a couple more of my observations scattered from my couple of weeks of using it. I 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's two USB-C 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 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 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 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 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. 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. Um, 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 going to buy one of these things. Now, before you go, here's a question: have you ever looked at a laptop or smartphone and wondered

what's going on inside it? Because Channel sponsor dbrand has your answers. Now you've seen for years now one of my favorite party tricks has been this sheet of magnet paper. You just lay it down on any device to see where a few of the internals are like the mag safe magnet array or the speaker. D Brand's x-ray line takes that magnet paper experience to a whole another level letting you see basically every single component inside your device. And yes, this is an actual legit x-ray of that device. Yes, dbrand took hundreds of devices to a Metrology lab and literally shot each one of them with a special x-ray machine for maximum accuracy. And they also made a light mode version of every x-ray. So personally, I am into the dark mode version, but hey, if you don't want to have to choose, if you buy any x-ray skin, you'll get the other colorway for free with your order. So if that sounds like a good deal to you, I'll leave a link for you to check them out.

below it's dbrand.com xray. but yeah that's been it. let me know what you think of the surface laptop of the whole windows on arm thing. I'll check out the comments but either way let me know. catch you guys on the next one. peace.

What's going on with Windows Laptops?

Marques Brownlee

The Performance of the New Microsoft Surface Laptop

The new Microsoft Surface laptop features a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip, providing a significant boost in battery life, lasting up to 23 hours for mixed use.

It also offers well-optimized performance for everyday tasks, such as photo editing and using the Microsoft Office Suite, despite not being designed for high-end gaming.

This $2,000 14-inch laptop is highly capable and efficient, marking a notable advancement for Windows laptops.

The Impact of Switching to ARM on App Compatibility

The transition to ARM architecture poses challenges for app compatibility, with three types of app responses: optimized for ARM, emulated from x86, and non-functional.

Many popular apps like Photoshop and Chrome run smoothly on Windows for ARM, while others, like Lightroom Classic, experience lag and performance issues through emulation.

Some apps, such as Arc browser and VMware, currently have no compatibility with Windows on ARM, posing challenges for users.

Challenges with Compatibility and App Availability on Windows ARM Laptops

Many apps have compatibility issues or are hard to find for Windows on ARM, making it important to research app compatibility before choosing a device.

The laptop offers a premium build quality, a good selection of ports, but lacks an OLED option, providing a high-quality LCD touchscreen instead.

The Performance and Features of the New ARM-based Windows Laptop

The laptop offers strong overall performance but is not ideal for high-end gaming due to its built-in GPU.

It is equipped with a lot of cores for multitasking but has weaker individual core performance.

The device stands out for its ability to stay cool, with a dedicated co-pilot button for AI-related tasks and a premium matte black design, making it a promising option for ARM-based laptop enthusiasts.

Dbrand's x-ray line offers a unique way to see every component inside your device, using a special x-ray machine for maximum accuracy.

The company took hundreds of devices to a Metrology lab to create these x-ray skins, and each purchase includes both a light mode and a dark mode version.

com/xray to learn more about this innovative product.