If You’re Tired of MacBooks Winning…

ever since Apple came out with that

first M1 laptop the entire Windows

laptop space has been trying to play

catchup on Energy Efficiency like at

this point Windows devices have better

screens they have better performance

they have better pricing they have

better gaming capabilities they have

upgradable components there's so much

stuff that's better when it comes to

Windows devices but when it comes to

Energy Efficiency Apple has the very

clear lead and this is the metric that

Apple leans in on right even when they

first launched the chip that was their

whole thing performance per watt year on

year it's like the thing that they lean

on for their marketing material because

it's really good now the reason why it's

so important is because Energy

Efficiency defines so much stuff when it

comes to a laptop it defines like the

form factor your battery life your heat

output your how loud your fans are maybe

you can even have a fanless system if

it's energy efficient enough and one of

the main reasons why MacBooks have such

good Energy Efficiency is because they

use the arm architecture in their chips

instead of the x86 architecture that the

vast majority of Windows laptops use now

very soon like in a matter of weeks we

are going to be seeing a whole slew of

laptops that contain a new chip from

Qualcomm the arm-based Snapdragon X

Elite and these laptops are supposed to

be able to properly compete against

Apple's MacBooks across the board now

you might be thinking Dave arm-based

Windows laptops aren't anything new how

do we know that this one won't suck like

all the other ones of the past I

wondered the same thing so uh in 2019 I

did my first review of a arm-based

Windows laptop the Surface Pro X and my

review of that device was it was

lukewarm at best you know what I can't

even call lukewarm I said that thing

sucked because they just had bad

software support and even for apps that

did run on it it just didn't have great

performance the chip wasn't special

enough for people to be for people to

buy it and because people weren't

purchasing this thing I don't even think

manufacturers were that interested in

doing follow-ups of that device but this

time it's really different because if

you look at this new chip the Snapdragon

Elite chip almost every major laptop

company is going to be on board for this

launch because the performance of this

chip has caught their eye it seems to be

really good in geekbench and cin bench

now granted these are synthetic

benchmarks running native versions of

those benchmarks so it's like best case

scenario but very impressive numbers

Apple does have their M3 Max but that's

just a completely different class of

Chip and also if you look at some of the

GPU benchmarks it's quite impressive

there is one thing to note here if you

look at those benchmarks there's two

variants that they showed a 23 watt

version and then an 80 watt version an

80 watt TDP is fairly high for a laptop

23 to 30 is probably kind of like your

average thin and light 14inch device I

am a little bit disappointed that they

didn't showcase some kind of like 10 to

15 watt performance metric because if

they had shown that that to me would

have been like there's going to be a

fanless version right CU I think on a

fanless device you kind of need to keep

it below 15 watts TDP I think in general

we're going to be seeing devices that

are much quieter compared to an Intel or

an AMD system right now but still having

awesome performance now the second thing

I want to talk about is software so all

the benchmarks that you saw right there

were done on apps that were built

specifically for arm chips now right now

in 2024 there's a decent amount of like

first-party Microsoft apps that run

natively on arm chips but the vast

majority of thirdparty apps still do not

have versions that are natively compiled

for arm chips it's been like 4 years

since I did my review on the original

Surface Pro X and since that time I

would have imagined there'd be way more

developers that have gone on board with

this whole native arm stuff it's still

fairly limited now it does make sense

like from the perspective of developers

unless there's an actual demand for this

kind of stuff you're not going to put

the resources in time that's required to

maintain another version of your app but

I do think that with this new hardware

Snapdragon Elite it pushes customers

towards it because it's attractive and

consequently developers come with but

for the apps that are still

x86 you still need to run emulation to

be able to run it on these arm chips now

back in 2019

because those chips weren't super

powerful emulation was bad also the

emulator only supported 32-bit apps at

launch so that was also awful but now

it's actually pretty decent it supports

64-bit apps and emulated performance is

pretty close to Native but there is a

noticeable reduction in Energy

Efficiency when you run emulated apps

and that's just the nature of real-time

emulation Apple does handle their

emulation differently like technically

it's not even emulation it's a

translation layer so it actually creates

this unoptimized but native arm code the

first time we launch it so it's not as

big of a performance hit the point I'm

trying to make though is that Apple's

Rosetta 2 is like it's going to be

better than what Windows has in terms of

the emulation SL transation however

because of these chips being as powerful

as they are I think they can just brute

force it I think that you throw in an

x86 app on these new Snapdragon chips I

think it just has the power to just push

it out and be like it just works not as

energy efficient but it'll work now

qualcomm's also talked about gaming

performance on these new Chips I have my

reservations like the idea of emulated

games on these systems the chip is good

it's similar to like an RTX 3050 let's

say in terms of just raw performance

capabilities now qualcomm's telling

developers that existing Games should

just work but there's so much stuff that

goes wrong when you emulate games on

across architectures like I I can't

imagine it coming out smoothly at least

that's what it's been like in the past

so if there's any difference this time

I'd be pleasantly surprised um okay last

thing I want to talk about pricing and

configuration so uh we've seen well

these are these are arm chips and when

it comes to arm chips you don't tend to

not have removable Ram it's not like you

just like swap out Ram modules kind of

like MacBooks but also I think that

there won't be removable drives like I

think that the drives will be baked onto

these systems the same way that MacBooks

are so you're going to be stuck with

deciding and choosing your RAM

configuration and storage configuration

for the life of the product now because

this is Windows I really don't think

they're going to have like 8 gigabyte

RAM options and 256 storage options like

that to me I don't think Windows would

allow that I really don't so I think

they'll be like 16 and 512 at a minimum

but it's all baked on now the other

thing is pricing in order for this

product to matter I really think pricing

is like absolutely critical because if

everything lines up if they do have an

awesome chip with awesome battery life

with great emulation support like if

it's super expensive

none of this video matters this entire

product is dead to me if the pricing is

horrible because it's so competitive at

this point yes nothing can match the

power efficiency of apple and yes these

devices are theoretically the ones to be

able to do it but if the pricing sucks

there's just a million other really good

options that people are going to pick

instead of a super expensive arm-based

Windows laptop I just hope that Qualcomm

recognizes kind of the scenario they

have at hand here it's awesome

opportunity to make some real Headway in

like Market space and just awareness of

this type of product but please don't be

super expensive that would suck um okay

there you have it I really think these

Windows laptops will be I think they'll

be cool I think they'll be the first

time I've been interested in a Windows

like an arm-based Windows laptop in four

years it's been a

while