Microsoft launched Copilot+ PCs this month — a new class of Windows laptops with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus chips, on-device AI, and a redesigned ARM-friendly Windows experience. We bought one for testing. It's the closest Windows has ever come to the Apple Silicon experience.

What works well

  • 01 Battery life. Genuinely all-day on the Surface Laptop 7. The thermal behaviour is dramatically calmer than Intel Windows laptops.
  • 02 Wake-from-sleep and overall responsiveness — finally feels like a phone, not a laptop.
  • 03 Native ARM builds of Edge, Chrome, VS Code, and most of the modern web tooling are now in place.
  • 04 Prism (the x86 emulation layer) is real progress over Windows 11's previous attempt. Most apps run; many run fine.

What still bites

  • 01 Anti-cheat in major games — kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't support ARM Windows yet. Casual gaming works; competitive gaming doesn't.
  • 02 Some printer drivers. Yes, in 2024.
  • 03 Bits of the developer toolchain — particularly Linux containers — are slower than on Apple Silicon.
  • 04 Plenty of legacy enterprise software still won't run, or runs slowly under emulation.

The ARM-on-Windows category has been promising and failing for nearly a decade. Copilot+ PCs are the first generation where the platform is genuinely good and getting actively better.

How we're using it

  • 01 Test target for any cross-platform web project. ARM Windows is now its own performance profile.
  • 02 Browser performance regression checks — Snapdragon X is a different microarchitecture and we've already found one Chrome-on-ARM bug.
  • 03 Reference machine for clients shipping enterprise products that need to run on Copilot+ generation hardware.

The ARM-on-Windows category has been promising and failing for nearly a decade. Copilot+ PCs are the first generation where the platform is genuinely good and getting actively better. We don't expect mass-migration off Apple Silicon — but for the first time, Windows has a real laptop platform of its own again.

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Read Surface Pro X: ARM on Windows is here, almost. → 25 October 2023 Snapdragon X Elite: Qualcomm is finally serious about laptops.
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Read Snapdragon X Elite: Qualcomm is finally serious about laptops. →