Ah, good month, eh? Right, I haven't charged my laptop in days. Couldn't care less. I didn't charge mine for an entire week. Have not had a single problem. Me neither, but there has been one thing stressing me out. I just want to get my work done. I was worried we might not have enough content to talk about, but now that's solved too. Sponsor Segways Ridge. They're doing a massive sweepstakes now until September 13th with prizes like a Hennessy Velociraptor, not the dinosaur, a gold-plated cyber truck, or $100,000 in cash. Enter for free and get one entry per dollar spent using the link in the description. The first sign that this ch all was going to be a little different than the previous ones was the number of people who wanted to participate. Arc GPU challenge. Anyone want to use Intel Arc for a month? Come on. Snapdragon challenge. Anyone want to use one of these for a month? Oh my God. And it's easy to see why people want it. In my entire mindset has changed to

the point where I used to see a sliver of battery, and I would drop everything that I was doing and dash to the outlet. Whereas now, I think, hm, interesting. I guess I'll finish up a few things and then maybe I'll plug in at some point, right? On one of my first days, okay, I got a notification that I was at 10% battery, and it was in critical mode. I then proceeded to finish up a team's voice call, including screen sharing on that call. I made some edits to a script. I then wrote a couple of emails, did some notes, checked my battery life, and hm, casual, ual 6%, no problem. However, it's worth noting that in the last month, I've used my laptop the way that I use my laptop, which is to say I've installed basically nothing on it. We don't even use Word in the writing department anymore, so almost everything I do is in a browser or a browser-based program. I've used it for video conferencing, Discord, OBS, screen cap. Okay, that's not

in a browser, but all of those things worked perfectly. Now, I have had some slightly weird stuff happen with Bong Jour always um, but it hasn't really bothered me enough to go back to worrying about my battery life. Yeah, for me, the experience has been even better than I expected. In a month, I have charged my laptop a total of five times, and if you look at the dates, there is an entire week where I did not plug it in once. Obviously, during that week, I was not using it a ton, typically two, three hours a day, day something like that. But with every other laptop that I've ever used, Windows, Apple, you just cannot do that. That's actually a really good point because lots of Windows laptops are rated for eight-plus hours of battery life. Yeah, that's not the issue. The issue is when I go to use it the next day on any other laptop, 20% battery, end of the day, you have to plug it in. On this, it's like, Okay, 20%, I'll use it for four hours.

tomorrow great. The heaviest program I use regularly is SolidWorks, and for occasional use like what I do on the go, performance is usable for me. It is fine because any large assemblies I need to tackle, I just do on my desktop, and I only run SolidWorks on my laptop to make small adjustments to parts in the shop. But it is emulated, and the raw performance is very similar to my old laptop, which has a low-powered 2-core CPU that was slow when it was released 2 years ago. Right? What I was afraid would be a deal breaker for me was car audio, but it's actually just totally fine. Our calibrated measurement microphones just worked, allowing me to get these measurements right here for MX5 review. Watch it on Short Circuit. And then came the much bigger challenge doing a new tune on my car. No way. This involved niche DSP drivers, a bunch of random Windows runtimes, and DirectX licensing server, all to cooperate, which is not even a guarantee on regular x86.

Windows machine matches, but it just did it, and now I have a 2C tune of my car. It sounds absolutely fantastic. So, unfortunately, my work can't be really done on the pen and paper. What are you saying about what I do is also work? Well, my work is, you know, more video editing, and I can't really video edit on, like, you know, a pen and paper. And as a recent graduate, I decided to take a perspective of a university student because I feel like university students are the people who really buy these laptops. So, I just like, Oh, it'd be a cool way to determine if this is actually good for, you know, people's school. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, 'cause you're not going to have another computer. Exactly. Yeah, the first and simplest thing I tried to do was watch YouTube videos, but instead, I got audio render issues saying I need to reset my computer. Fortunately, I had this great LTT laptop bag, LTTstore.com. Man, this thing is freaking awesome. It's got all the room, opens up so big.

oh yeah baby stores everything. Sorry, sorry, sorry. What were you saying? Well, fortunately, the computer was one step ahead of me there because for the first couple of days, I had a load of crashes that restarted the computer for me. Next, I want to edit some flow plan exclusives, which I thought would be fine because Qualcomm did say that they're going to support Adobe Creator Suites, which turns out it was only Photoshop and graphic design stuff, no Premiere. Great. No, I thought Premiere works when I first got it. My first thing was to try installing it, and it wasn't there. I was like, What's up with that? It just works. Fortunately, after a week of daily driving it, it was there, but there was a catch. After Effects still missing, so I couldn't do any of the fun graphics. Premiere was emulated and just sucked, honestly. Using Premiere on this thing was not a good experience. There is one more thing to say. It's in the script. He's doing his best, but only the 2023 version is supported. Like 2024 is three.

qus over and they're only supporting 2023. I had to convert most of my projects to the 2023 versions just so I can start editing. I tried editing three videos. The first one was fine until I started adding screen caps to it, which then it pooped itself. The second one was a YouTube sh at 1080p, which was mostly fine, but I ended up switching to a real computer for animations at the end. And the third one was a 4K multicam sequence, and oh yeah, it died. I think it loaded it in, and then it just didn't work. There's not a chance, honestly. I think the most telling part of all of that is the way that you referred to a normal x86 computer as a real computer. So in a month, you didn't manage to completely edit a single video on it, even though Premiere is supported. Yeah, like the worst part is parsik didn't work that great either, so I didn't really get to remote into my desktop and edit it. So I was like this.

determined that the speed I was going to go at parcing in versus editing on my computer wasn't going to justify it, so I ended up just moving back to my computer. Yeah, I didn't try to use Parc, and that's the thing, right, is when an application doesn't work, you're basically stuck. If this is your only computer, there's no backup plan. The emulation all runs automatically, so it's not like you can install an emulator and maybe it'll work now. It just doesn't work. I actually had my first near showstopper just yesterday. Talk about a buzzer beater. I was using channelizer for the how much Wi-Fi is too much video, and I started getting random crashes. At first, I thought, Okay, it's probably a license issue since I haven't checked in with Metageek for 2 years. And then I realized, Oh, hold on a second. It's always crashing after a little while when I go inside the chamber. Maybe it needs an always-on connection. But obviously, I wouldn't have

any Wi-Fi in an RF isolation chamber. Then it turned out that the emulation was bad. Oh wow, yeah. So nothing to do with the license. And I had another bizarre issue yesterday too. I got a notification that I was running out of battery, which was fine. I hadn't charged it in like 6 days or something like that. But when the speaker went off, I didn't think about this until you mentioned your audio rendering issues, but it started like buzzing at me really weird, which makes me wonder if maybe it's something to do with the platform. You guys haven't actually seen this yet, but I'm going to show you. This is super weird. Oh what, what the. It's like a spaceship. It just didn't stop. Overall, I've been happy with the machine though, especially the keyboard. And like I said to you, I never use my laptop outside, so the screen, total non-issue. But I noticed right at the end that HP cheaped out on the Wi-Fi. I only got Wi-Fi 6E instead of Wi-Fi 7. Well my

Surface Laptop 7 does have Wi-Fi 7, but I would much rather have your 6E chip in there if that meant my experience was good in areas where my Wi-Fi strength wasn't great. Like, you just know that spot in your house it just wouldn't work sometimes. I would load in a YouTube video, and then halfway through, it would just disconnect from Wi-Fi, and it was super annoying. Both of you guys had good Wi-Fi, right? Yeah, yeah, mine was perfect actually. It was really good. Yeah, I used that thing for a week making the review. I also didn't have an issue, so that was great. I think it's Microsoft and their antenna design. Wait, I wonder if HP knows something I don't know and used the 60 for a reason. Which one's yours? Wi-Fi 7 must just be the antenna design then. Yeah, could also just be a bunk unit. But another area that's been pretty good for me is gaming. Now, in our live stream, half of the games we tested didn't work.

but real-world use is a little bit different than just having you guys send games to us and us running whatever you ask. Like for me, from the time that I spent with the Steam Deck, my mentality shifted a little bit from I want to game, I want to play this game, and nothing else is acceptable to I'm in the mood to game, I'm willing to find something that works with the device that's in front of me. So obviously, it's not the best, but I actually kind of found that I was okay with it. Yeah, if you treat it like a second computer, I think it's okay. But I tried playing a lot of the games that are popular with the youth like me, okay, 27, like League of Legends, Valorant, Fortnite, and Minecraft. The first three didn't work, like it just would not boot. I could download it, but Minecraft was just too laggy. So getting one of these laptops for school means you probably aren't playing games with your friends. Don't do that, parents. I'm kind of split on this one.

the three games that I play the most just straight up do not work on this laptop. But also, they straight up do not work on the last laptop that I used either. So, right, you used to thin and light with old onboard graphics anyway. So, I'm pretty flexible. Like, I'm going on a long flight tomorrow. I installed Animal Well on this. It works great. I do not care if I don't get to do 3D games on this. And at the same time, 120 Hz display. This thing is awesome to game on. I just want to highlight how good this screen is. Same screen as well. Fantastic 3x2 Quad HD 12 Hz. Bright enough to use outdoors. And the most incredible thing is that this display did not even stand out in our last video. Typically, the two biggest power draws on a laptop are the CPU and the display. And previously, I was willing to live with a mediocre display because the OLED screen option was just not worth it for battery life. But when the CPU is this efficient.

you can just give up 4 hours of battery life, and it will be totally fine. It really is the closest thing that we have to the MacBook experience, and while game compatibility sucks compared to normal windows, it's still a lot better than mac. Dang sick burn. One final thing about the surface is that the webcam is fantastic. In the very first video call that I had on it, I got compliments on just how great it looks. Yeah, I also got compliments on it. Mic was good, and webcam was good. Now here's something I'd like to compliment you guys. You've lasted a long time here at Lius Media Group, being on Microsoft and Samsung's payroll respectively. You guys what? Okay, no, you know what, they are right. They're right. The webcam is actually a standout feature. However, I want to change the topic a little bit. This is 2024, we got to talk about AI. We love AI. Does it make me a boomer that I completely forgot about the co-pilot button except for the one time?

I pressed it by accident. I was really, I'm actually a big fan of co-pilot and just like chat GPT, like LLMs in general. And I like how accessible it was to, you know, just one click button. I can just look it up. It's way more convenient than open my browser typing in chat GPT. You kids know about bookmarks, right? Do you know about doing up more than half of the buttons on your shirt? It's a style. It's a, uh, he knows style. I know style, and my footwear is cringe. My footwear is, yo, okay, well, you guys vote, vote in the comments, leave a like for mine, and leave a comment for Samy's. Subscribe to Flo plane if you just want Runners, and I do use chat GPT sometimes just to help with polishing my wordings and just general research because ghou sucks. We have a whole video about that. I used co-pilot a couple of times when I accidentally tried to lock my laptop, went like that. I just want to mention before.

people think I completely hate this laptop. I think the physical appearance of the laptop was great. Like you said, the keyboard's great, you know, the webcam is great, the mic's great. It's extremely light. I had the Samsung laptop with my personal heavy laptop, and it was so light and thin. I didn't notice a weight difference in my backpack, nor did I feel like I had any space issues. The fan also, I don't know if you guys have any comments about it, but mine was so quiet. I totally forgot to comment about it because I didn't notice it once. It's just that quiet. And I feel like, you know, if you're in a lecture, I feel like you always hear one or two people that have like the whole time, right? Like their Alienware, and that's especially true if they're trying to actually record anything, like especially with video. Like, man, I don't know what it is. Every Windows laptop I've ever owned, all I got to do is get on a Teams

call it sounds like it's trying to take off from the desk. I mean, I don't blame it; those calls are boring anyway. What are we feeling overall, guys? I've had a great time with mine, only running into a major issue at day 29 out of 30. That's pretty darn good. I love it. I don't think I'm going back to x86. I'm not sure that I will for now. I don't feel like this can be your primary computer, maybe not even your own laptop, but personally, I would highly recommend this as a secondary computer or tertiary by that point, since you've got a desktop and a laptop already, and this is just your mobility-focused computer. But that's fair enough depending on what you're doing. Now, one thing to remember is that AMD just released a lineup of CPU that is much more competitive battery life-wise, but they aren't competitive price-wise. These come in at a lower cost than AMD and presumably Intel's upcoming latest-gen mobile CPUs, meaning that you can't really compare them directly like

maybe by going Qualcomm, you give up some program compatibility, but you get more RAM, or you get a better screen, which could make things even more compelling if you can actually work on it, though. Well, yeah, that is a major issue, and I think we're in agreement then. Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops are excellent if everything you do is in a browser, or if you already have another computer for the work that you need to do on another computer. Hopefully, someday, it'll be for everyone. Like this segue to our sponsor, Manscaped. You know the sphere in Las Vegas? Now your head can look like that too. Okay, maybe not with all the images and RGB, but with Manscaped's new Dome Shaver Pro and Dome Soother aftershave lotion, your Noggin can be smoother than that analogy. The Dome Shaver Pro has five premium rotary blades, is powered by a 9,500 RPM motor for consistent and efficient shaving, plus its magnetic head makes cleaning and replacing the blades easy. Speaking of easy, the USB-C charging port means

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It’s Perfect. It’s Unusable. - Snapdragon for a Month Challenge Conclusion

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
