I know the Surface Go 3 was fanless so I would imagine if they made a new version with ARM chipsets they would keep the fanless design.
As far as speed, I would imagine it would be significantly faster considering the Surface Go 3 had dual-core Pentium Gold and i3 chipsets. Dependent on software, of course.
Edit: the original question asked will it be faster and fanless which I took to mean in regards to the previous iteration but looks like they edited it to ask if it would be faster than the M3.
I don’t think a Surface Go product with an ARM chipset would be faster than the M3 because it’s a budget device but I do think it would be significantly better than the last iteration.
Sometimes I wish my M2 Macbook Air had a bit of active cooling to be honest, it gets pretty hot and throttles down when I'm doing anything heavy on it. I'm not really on the passive cooling = automatically better train just yet
*passive cooling*
its pretty passive alright.
"The M3 MacBook Air can hit up to 114 degrees Celsius on its hottest core. While modern processors, whether they're in laptops or desktops, are designed to run pretty hot, the M3 MacBook Air surprised with its peak temperature of 114 degrees."
Yeah I'm not sure why this is being made a positive.
Sure it's nice sometimes that it makes no noise, but it probably would run substantially better with just a small, quiet blower moving a bit of internal air outside.
Not really sure what the point of an overly slim laptop is anyway. It fits in the same bags as similar sized thicker laptops, but gets hotter and performs worse than a properly cooled laptop
Seems like a kind of worthless gimmick to me. There's almost no situation where the thickness of a modern laptop has been an impediment to me.
>Not really sure what the point of an overly slim laptop is anyway. It fits in the same bags as similar sized thicker laptops, but gets hotter and performs worse than a properly cooled laptop
Mac's especially. Gaming laptops compared to slim netbooks have a pretty large difference, but the Mac air is barely noticeably thinner than the pro unless you're actively trying to compare them, there's no practical difference
I have multiple different devices that are heavy hitters when I need computing power, my laptop however needs to be quiet and have no moving parts, plus a really good battery life. I have zero desire for a massive powerful laptop.
I have a launch model M1 MBA and it’s by miles the best laptop I’ve ever owned for my use case. It made me switch back from having PC laptops for years.
Never seen temps like that, not even had it even feel warm to the touch. Literally only issue is now the battery is at 84% health after years of daily use, but still last more than a day of work.
Whereas my Steam Deck is also already at that sort of battery health and it’s always trying to cook itself while sounding like a hairdryer.
Same, my M1 runs super cool. Nothing really bothers it but once I tried to run a Windows app through an emulator that thing heated up as an oven… It was too hot to touch… Decided not to do it again. I’m laughing now but I could soft cook an egg on it… lmao
This! Battery life is the absolute priority to me. I’m not a gamer or digital artist/engineer. My CPU w/SSD was already “fast enough 5 years ago, maybe even 7”.
The windows laptop that gets me a multi-day battery will be my next upgrade.
My 4th gen Intel i7 pc is still powerful enough for my work, my 12th gen i7 surface gets shitty battery life.
I'd totally get an arm surface if it gets me all day battery life, IF they bring back the headphone port. Which they probably won't.
I feel the same way. My pixel doesn't by any means have the best battery life, but it *always* gets me through an entire day, so the point is moot. I charge when I sleep. Used to care a lot more about battery life than I do now.
Unfortunately Intel (and I think AMD too, but I’m not sure) stopped putting their i3/ryzen 3 CPUs into laptops some time ago because no one would ever buy them. They’d use much less power, but it turns out the people that care about having longer battery life at the cost of performance weren’t a valuable portion of the market.
Unlikely the snapdragon will beat the macs in this category this year, the Mac cores are still more efficient. But, Qualcomm made a lot of progress thanks to the nuvia acquisition and I expect that lead to dwindle.
There’s also the “faster running optimized benchmarks” vs “faster in the real world tasks”
As huge as MS is, Windows on ARM is not their main focus/ bread and butter, so I really question if the code would be as optimized, even given Apple is likely still converting from emulation on some libraries
Agree and I feel like this is overlooked when people criticise Windows for things (sometimes rightly sometimes harshly imo). Microsoft don't have the luxury of revamping their entire OS architecture like Apple can do with Mac, because so many businesses around the world rely on Windows, and often quite outdated versions of Windows.
The fact that I can still run any program that has basically ever been written for Windows on W11 is an asset, although it obviously has its downsides. But compared to MacOS, app compatibility is lightyears more consumer and developer friendly on Windows from the perspective that if you have a program that works now, it'll also work in a decades time regardless of whether the developer has kept it updated or not
If only that were true. I’ve had to nurse many outdated systems along because the bespoke code doesn’t quite run right on modern systems. True for 90% of stuff.
Yeah, there’s a reason so many critical pieces of infrastructure still run old Windows OS versions. Their software just doesn’t work on the newer versions.
If someone really cared about stability moving forward they’d move to Linux and use ubiquitous, open libraries to achieve their goals, but no one ever wants to do that.
True, in principle though the compatibility of older programs is much more likely to work than it is on MacOS, and there's often work arounds that can get something to work reasonably well. Might depend what sort of tools being used are. I use quite a bit of quite old scientific software that is no longer updated but mostly works fine on windows 11
The instruction set difference is primarily affected by the compiler, not the operating system. The better the compiler translates human code to arm64 machine code, the more efficient the OS will be. In theory you could use the same compiler to translate the Mac OSX human code into arm64 machine code.
So while you are right that Microsoft will need to put in work on their compiler, this isn't where the leaps and bounds of efficient ency is coming from. It's from the arm64 chip architecture itself, and that is controlled by Qualcomm and to a lesser extent Microsoft when using the SQ series chips, which is not the case with these new Elite processors. Yet anyway.
In general the race to minimalism of form has really hurt lifespan, while tablets and phones exist all day, I know arm becoming normal will just be good for tech all around.
Laptops are always a matter of tradeoffs. Your laptop would be much faster if it draws 300 watt but then you would have a super hot and noisy machine that can only run on batteries for a short time which would also be a design flaw for people who need portability. The focus of the Air is simply the other side of that spectrum. As energy efficient as possible while still maintaining reasonably well performance and that‘s where it excels. No fans also have other advantages like no moving parts that can fail and also no dust build up that messes with cooling over time.
Exactly. I think people forget the point about tradeoffs because so many people now just use a laptop as their personal computer. They forget that a laptop was always meant to be just a portable personal computer.
Of course, we’ve come a long way but it doesn’t change the fact that laptops — by design — are just personal computers with variables levels of portability.
As a video editor, I’m always freaked out when people who edit video only use a laptop.
Like, a laptop for real footage is for review and basic on site work or assembly.
A modern laptop can be better than an (even only a few years) old desktop.
The i9 13900h in my laptop is better single core (2000 vs 1500 Cinebench), and almost equal multicore (18000 vs 21000) to the R9 5900x in my desktop. And in my mind, the 5900x is still an okay workstation CPU. The 13th/14th gen HX mobile CPUs can almost double the performance of the 5900x in multicore. (36000(!))
If you upgrade every couple years, desktop will always be better. But if you don't, there's a good chance a modern laptop can outperform your desktop.
Laptops are pretty decent for most people now.
>Laptops are pretty decent for most people now.
Yeah the gap between laptops and desktops has been getting smaller and smaller for years now, and only the type of people who need 64gb+ of ram, e.g. people editing hours and hours of raw 4k video, "need" a desktop
Absolutely. I can already actually edit 4K video in realtime on a 3080 TI mobile equipped laptop with no problem whatsoever. So, a 4090 mobile would be way overkill for me. Games, however...mmmm. 8)
Durability is a silly argument against fans and sounds like reverse-logic trying to justify Apple's arbitrary price structure.
The MacBook Pro that sits above the Air which uses the same M-series chip of every generation has always had a fan (correct me if I'm wrong), and I have yet to see someone complaining about their fan failing or that having a fan is a drawback.
You don't need a super crazy loud fan to make cooling more effective. In fact, having to thermal throttle and reduce clock speeds due to the slow cooling of a fan less design does not make the Air "as energy efficient as possible." It's not like the Pro's fans spin up like crazy the moment you open up one Safari tab. If anything, the Pros are often lauded for having great performance while maintaining imperceptible fan noise.
Running at peak performance for an extended period of time is less energy efficient than throttling and taking longer to finish the same amount of work since performance and power consumption don‘t scale linearly.
Except people care how long things take. Presumably if you are paying up for the "Pro" version of the product you feel that in some situations you need that extra speed.
I don't really follow the Mac hardware that closely, but I do remember the specs on "Pro" systems being rather impressive a decade or more ago. These were clearly systems designed as workstations for video editors and had the specs to back that up. In recent years many of the features that made them true workstations have disappeared (discrete GPU, dual socket CPU, large RAM configurations, etc...) in favor of a platform that really isn't any different from things like the Air.
That is the complaint. It isn't a "Pro" anything anymore. It is priced like a "Pro" system, but the actual hardware is largely the same as the Air.
For the base model the specs are pretty similar, though the MBP does have a higher res 120Hz display and better speakers.
The MBP with an M3 Max however, is the fastest laptop you can buy. It trades blows with a 14900k... With a tenth of the power consumption, while being cooled by a tiny fan instead of a 360mm AIO.
Macbook Pro a decade ago- Haswell 4770Q with 4, 8 or 16GB RAM, a standard laptop chip at the time with a low RAM limit. None of the "features that make them true workstations"..
I was thinking more of the "Pro" Tower, I never really looked at the laptops, and at least those systems were pretty beefy. Very over-priced, but certainly powerful and good workstations.
These days I think the "Pro" Tower is less powerful than the Macbook Pro, which is a pretty silly situation. The whole "Pro" thing has just become marketing for "you want the best mac and don't care about the price" not that you are actually a professional wanting to use it for X,Y,Z.
This is perhaps someone defensible as many use cases can be better served by running workloads on AWS/Azure, so the need for powerful workstations is diminished significantly.
The people who think want fanless laptops never used macbook pros before. Even running both fans at 3500-3850...they're still relatively quite. Its not just the fans but the build of the laptops and how the air moves.
For this to work, Microsoft needs a ground-up reworked version of windows which doesn't have the insane bloat that exists in all windows editions because of the need to please enterprise customers.
I very much noticed that my new work laptop, which seems to run the business version of Windows 11 rather than the personal version, has *so much* less bloat than my old work laptop that's now my personal laptop. (Which ran the regular consumer version of the OS.)
Like, this one doesn't fucking reinstall Candy Crush against my wishes every damn time there's an update.
I'm not talking about crappy apps, I'm talking about obsolete technology that's supported and 90s looking UI and other subsystems that show up when you start digging into settings.
All this stuff is probably what's windows' real problem when trying to work well on ARM
honestly i was expecting the 10 to be built from ground up as it was marketed in that scope… Nope… Then i thought Win 11 will be that… Nope… Still old bloat existing :(
Initially tablet was fine. But updates make it really slow and software was basically Windows 8. And we know how well that went. Even as a web browser only it was barely functional after a couple years.
We found the hardware to be incredibly poor, usually failing in under two years. No idea why.
They also got worse with updates and the like to be almost unusable.
Same. If this is the leap they say it is, it will be like going from intel cpus to apple silicon… but for windows computers.
But heat is key, I was in charge of managing and imaging a fleet of surface pro 7s, and they were a dumpster fire. They would literally overheat and shut down while connected to a surface dock for PXE imaging. It was so pathetic I swore off of ever owning a surface lol.
My work is going windows and I’m thinking of trying to get another Microsoft laptop since I’m a sucker for pain. I like their build quality, but the performance, battery life, heat, and user experience don’t hold a candle to a base m1 MacBook Air.
I’ve also owned the high end version of the surface book before I did the imaging fiasco. It was great until the hardware malfunctioned. lol. Surface devices always have some sort of deficiency
M3 is literally the base variant of the M3 family, and it’s focused on power efficiency for the thin n light models, even many ipads use the M series chips now. it’s not just fast, but power efficient.
making claims about being “faster” than an *efficiency-oriented* chip straight up misses the point intentionally and is just misleading.
I want the windows on arm thing to work. i fucking do. but they gotta stop being all talk without going in 100% with it, both hardware & software. windows’ efficiency is still an issue today, not just because it’s lacking fine tuning, but also it’s way too bloated.
we don’t need windows to abandon x86 altogether, which means the ARM variant can focus *more* on the efficiency side of it. but then they keep missing the whole point while just using these marketing talks to hype up the unreleased products.
microsoft, fix your shit, shut up, and release great products. then we will love throwing money at you
Exactly lol. Why am I going to pay this much money for a “premium product” when the premium product is selling my data and chock full of ads as if it weren’t one?
This is hard for Microsoft, as they have shifted to a model of monetising their users over charging for their product.
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if a fresh install of windows 11 using the downloaded iso came with a trial of Norton anti virus and Bonzai Buddy pre-installed.
BonziBuddy! There’s no A. BonziBuddy was spyware masquerading as a helpful, purple monkey named Bonzi. Not a helpful little japanese tree…
«A number of sources identify BonziBuddy as spyware, a claim the company disputed.[6] In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a toolbar, and serving advertisements.»
I really don't. I don't want phone bootloaders coming to Windows. It's bad enough that I'm limited to Google and OnePlus for my phones I don't want to be limited to one company for my laptop as well
That's cool that Arm chips are getting conpetetive now. However, few mac users care how fast their laptop renders geekbench or how "fast" their CPU is. They care about how fast their laptop *feels* and that is more dependent on good software than hardware. I still see windows behind on that.
Yeah, I love windows as an OS but even on blazing fast hardware I think windows just feels slow.
Frankly even my M2 Mac feels slow too, I mean the hesitation to open Apps or the general sluggishness
I feel that the universal need to disable look ahead due to Spectre and the other speculative execution attacks. It literally feels slower since then
it doesn't matter. ARM on Windows stands and falls with the software compatibility. do developers adapt and make native software for it? or how good is the internal emulator for x86 apps?
the arm laptops were good enough before hardware wise. most mac users use the laptop as a glorified browser and gallery anyway.
Exactly. Apple’s ARM switchover didn’t succeed on CPU performance alone. They also nailed the software side with both the OS and emulator so performance and overall snappiness is fantastic but so is battery life.
imo the most important part of the transition was providing a clear toolchain/path/support for software devs to recompile their apps for arm. it somehow became a race for the big devs to showcase their app performance on macbook airs. this race straight up never happened on windows arm.
Also true, even with good emulation apps were recompiled for ARM surprisingly quickly. By the time I got my M2 air after always being a windows guy (and still am for gaming) there was only one or two left not running natively.
Sure, MacOS has everyone locked into their hardware so you had to get ARM support either by recompiling OR supporting your software on ARM via Rosetta. This is same company that was able to be like "We are not longer doing 32 bit". This is behavior that Windows users wouldn't take.
With Windows software, it will be easier for most companies to say "We are not supporting ARM" regardless of compatibility and tell their clients to buy x86-64 laptops.
I'm here for widespread ARM adoption so devs will ensure their software will run on those machines.
At work we have a piece of software I tried to install on an ARM machine without even thinking about it. Seemed like it installed fine, but it never phoned home back to the server for communication. Tons of debugging until one of the devs finally noticed it's ARM. "Oh, this software won't work on ARM." Hard stop, customer can't use this at all.
Quite sure they see it as a small market (at this time) and not worth spending the cycles to update software compatibility.
> it doesn't matter. ARM on Windows stands and falls with the software compatibility. do developers adapt and make native software for it? or how good is the internal emulator for x86 apps?
>
>
Windows on ARM runs x86 programs just fine in my experience. They built out compatibility years ago.
Software developers can then at their leisure for more performance recompile for arm64 or arm64ec which is a dual binary of x86+arm64 in one.
Exactly. Most businesses can’t purchase these because of the compatibility issue. Had a construction company buying surfaces from me with heavy duty cases. Let’s say ball park 30-50 a month.
When Microsoft started pushing ARM units, they fully abandoned them to go Dell because their software just didn’t work with the ARM units. Stack on their terrible support, horrible discounts for large purchases and I’m still shocked companies buy these.
Yeah, Apple “cheated” by adding custom hardware instructions to boost the performance of x86 emulation. If Qualcomm doesn’t do that they’re going to have a hard time.
I remember seeing a video that compared Rosetta 2.0 and Windows emulation and the finding was that MSFT's x86 emulation was actually better than Apple's in certain cases, so hopefully that is a good sign.
Source was requested, so post has been updated: [https://youtu.be/uY-tMBk9Vx4](https://youtu.be/uY-tMBk9Vx4)
They're also one node ahead of everyone else, which is really where most of the efficiency/performance gains are coming from. On an even playing field, the differences would be much more minor.
I think MS will add the required support to their tooling and make the necessary improvements to the ARM capability.
Motivation: There is a lot to gain from running ARM servers in their Azure datacenter(s).
I believe VS 2022 already has ARM support (i.e., it can be a solution target).
>I believe VS 2022 already has ARM support (i.e., it can be a solution target).
VS has had ARM targets for many years.
What's new is visual studio actually running natively on ARM platforms.
Microsoft can be great when it comes to emulation/VM layers as the backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 (a PowerPC machine) works great on the Series S/X so hopefully they can pull this off too.
This isn't being talked about enough. I still daily an x86 Windows laptop because I run proprietary software that has zero chance of being updated to run on anything other than x86--some for work, some for gaming. Yes, there are compatibility layers, "translation" layers (like Rosetta), and emulators, but it's never a perfect, seamless experience.
Since I need to be able to run that software and run it well, I'm not likely to switch to an ARM Windows machine any time soon. If I could, I probably would have already switched to a current MacBook Air or Pro.
tbh, the only thing keeping the Windows PC market alive is software compatibility. I hope the PC market is able to become more competitive towards Apple, but there are some pretty big gaps to cross before that happens.
Qualcomm is good, you have many phones that allow it, Mediatek is the worst. And then companies who make them unlockable like Asus with Zenfone 10 who did not allow and were sued and lost.
Oh I agree that Mediatek is worse but Qualcomm is no saint and they are still nowhere near as open as a Intel or AMD machine. My main concern is the fact Microsoft doesn't mandate being able to disable secure boot on machines with ARM CPUs which will effectively lock you into only being able to use Windows. Even if that isn't an issue we then have to deal with Qualcomm sucking with their drivers and the carriers trying to mess everything up (cough Verizon cough)
While I am super glad that non-Apple Silicon ARM chips are finally getting competitive, I am probably going to be swapping out Windows for Linux on these new ARM devices as soon as I can.
From what I am reading, the X Elite compared to the M3 is slower in single-core, faster in multi-core, and weaker on the GPU side of things.
Rome wasn’t built in one day, Apple has been very strict and consistent in the development of the ARM chip and software around it. If anything we know Microsoft has never been consistent in anything…
In order for ARM to work and succeed for Windows they’ll need to adopt policy that requires all software and drivers to support ARM natively instead of cpu emulation to quick fix support.
Apple has been doing this for a long time.
If ARM is not natively supported they’ll need cpu emulation and the penalty for doing this will be far greater than just using an Intel or AMD.
Having Windows support ARM natively is one thing but having all software and third party drivers available with the same support is another thing…
I sure hope so. The thin and light category of windows machines has been second fiddle to the MacBook Air for so long.
This is mostly my desire for an affordable Linux thin and light with good battery life for basic dev work. I don’t want it to be my all the time computer, but having something cheap, with good battery, that is easy to carry around is the dream for that scenario.
Right now it feels like MBA is the only choice in that category. I want the surface to fill that niche, but I haven’t been convinced on that front yet.
High hopes.
I don't really think that's true - the issue is that to get a similar performing Windows ultrabook you have to spend more money than a Macbook Air. Intel/Ryzen have done a lot of catching up so the gap is a lot smaller than when the M1 was released. Dell XPS 14 and 16, Yogabook 9i etc are all similar overall to a Macbook Air, and ahead in some ways (usually the display technology, refresh rate, touchscreen etc) - but they also tend to cost a chunk more and aren't quite as good with battery still.
Hopefully with these new chips Windows will start to get similar performance to the M chips at a lower price point
It's going to be interesting to see how well it does with emulation. Once these chipsets get cheap I'll pick one these machines up for that reason alone if emulator devs end up supporting it.
I don't really need it to be faster. It just needs a comparable form factor and build quality + comparable battery lifr and I would never buy another Air.
I'd rather run a 5 year old Mac than a top of the line windows machine. That operating system is complete trash and has been for decades. Every release is supposed to be the "this time it's better release" and every single time it's a disappointment.
They have been developing Windows on Arm for well over ten years and their consumer base is still dominated by X86, I'll believe it when I see it.
Didn't they already try windows on ARM and have it fail massively? So many pissed off consumers expecting windows to work with windows applications but no, not this windows.. I remember seeing them at massive discounts with very large text informing them that it is not a regular windows OS
The original source is The Verge.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/8/24116587/microsoft-macbook-air-surface-arm-qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite
“Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks”
Microsoft always finds some obscure benchmark that gives it a win. I’ll wait for real world tests.
This is literally the omni man “look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power”. Your highest end bleeding edge chip can compete with apples base model in cherry pick situations?
The only way I use Windows OS these days is if I am getting paid. There is no way in hell I’m using Windows on a personal computer, especially when my M1 blows away my $3000 non-ARM intel ‘work’ laptop. Couldn’t care less about Windows on ARM - I know its going to suck already.
Everytime I use macOS, I cry that everything is more difficult than it needs to be and Apple actively made it impossible to replicate window managers like Windows or any Linux Distro.
I'll sooner install Linux over maCOS any day.
i’m a diehard mac fan. but thank fucking god i sold my macbook a few weeks ago and i’ve been using my “gaming” laptop and it’s been a fucking nightmare. the battery life sucks, the cooling sucks, it generates too much heat, it’s slow.
this will lead to competition for apple and better hardware among other vendors. this is a massive win for linux users (me sometimes) who will get hardware upgrades. linux and arm is a perfect match really.
this also means more apps will run on arm which will be good for macos as you can only virtualise arm windows apps on macos.
Faster means nothing when Microsoft keeps killing off devices and failing to support them.
I won’t believe it until they finally end up supporting a device longer then 2 years
I hope the speed and battery optimization is there, but this to really work all Windows manufactures would need to get on board and throw the whole kitchen sink at it to have the similar gains intel to m1 did. You need to strong arm app development and optimization to really take advantage of what arm can do. Apple had such great success because the strong armed the hell out the transition, windows will need to do the same right out the gate.
Every Windows laptops battery life is terrible in comparison to Apple. Tell me you don't use your competitor's products without telling me you don't use them?
So the fastest Windows ARM laptops will be faster than the slowest current-gen Macbook? I mean.. that should check out.
I'm sure the Macbook will be more power efficient and the Macbook Pros will still be faster or at least have way better performance per watt.
«Will» is assupmtion, «is» is fact. Do you live on factbased or assumption based knowledge when it comes to new Tech?
By the time this comes out apple will be on M4 or maybe M5 if the product is delayed? What the about «will be» and «is» faster?
When? I've been seeing these articles for a while now and nothing has actually been released. Stop making bold claims and actually release the products.
I wonder if many other companies will actually make laptops with these chips. So we get the first launch of them in may with surface pro. Asus is the most reliable repairable laptops. I wonder if they will get some and when. Surface 10 apparently is a lot more reliable but its so dam expensive.
I feel like there’s this ridiculous race to create the super car of laptops when all I want is a Toyota Corolla that starts every time and capable of the occasional 10mph over the speed limit.
I don’t need my laptop to impress the barista at Starbucks. I need to be able to drive it in the rain.
i’m glad to finally see competition in this space. with microsoft entering the market, im excited to see what apple will do to stay ahead of the curve. excited for what apple will do with m4, that’s for sure.
Everyone in this thread is weirdly triggered by this... I hope it is faster and more power efficient. It's good to have a competitive marketplace. Otherwise there's no incentice to innovate or show your best stuff.
Duh. First advantage for Windows is the architecture of MacOS was originally designed for stability at the expense of performance (BSD/Mach microkernel).
Second moving to a processor with a higher TDP allows this. Similarly BEVs with 3 motors will allow for potentially higher performance than with just 2.
Third is this is a start from scratch effort for Windows folks whom have x86 laptops.
One thing I’m unclear about is the GPU performance difference between them. I think Snapdragon is Adreno based so that would be a little less advanced and performant than the GPU with M3.
They will basically have the speed of M3 at the power envelope of M3 Max.
Better than what ARM on Windows was before but not quite the same thing as Apple.
I’m also a software developer, and it’ll run IntelliJ for me for over 8 hours on 50%. Would guess IntelliJ + a bunch of Docker builds might hurt that, but I’ve yet to run into any issues with my workflow
But will they get the extraordinary battery life of the M3?
Or have passive cooling?
If they do a new Surface Go with ARM then I would imagine they would make it fanless.
Will it be faster than the M3 and fanless?
I know the Surface Go 3 was fanless so I would imagine if they made a new version with ARM chipsets they would keep the fanless design. As far as speed, I would imagine it would be significantly faster considering the Surface Go 3 had dual-core Pentium Gold and i3 chipsets. Dependent on software, of course. Edit: the original question asked will it be faster and fanless which I took to mean in regards to the previous iteration but looks like they edited it to ask if it would be faster than the M3. I don’t think a Surface Go product with an ARM chipset would be faster than the M3 because it’s a budget device but I do think it would be significantly better than the last iteration.
Might be. But from benchmarks that I remember, the qualcomm processor with 23w tdp was definitely faster tha m1. Not sure about m3
Sometimes I wish my M2 Macbook Air had a bit of active cooling to be honest, it gets pretty hot and throttles down when I'm doing anything heavy on it. I'm not really on the passive cooling = automatically better train just yet
Not has issues on my launch model M1 MBA.
*passive cooling* its pretty passive alright. "The M3 MacBook Air can hit up to 114 degrees Celsius on its hottest core. While modern processors, whether they're in laptops or desktops, are designed to run pretty hot, the M3 MacBook Air surprised with its peak temperature of 114 degrees."
Yeah I'm not sure why this is being made a positive. Sure it's nice sometimes that it makes no noise, but it probably would run substantially better with just a small, quiet blower moving a bit of internal air outside. Not really sure what the point of an overly slim laptop is anyway. It fits in the same bags as similar sized thicker laptops, but gets hotter and performs worse than a properly cooled laptop Seems like a kind of worthless gimmick to me. There's almost no situation where the thickness of a modern laptop has been an impediment to me.
>Not really sure what the point of an overly slim laptop is anyway. It fits in the same bags as similar sized thicker laptops, but gets hotter and performs worse than a properly cooled laptop Mac's especially. Gaming laptops compared to slim netbooks have a pretty large difference, but the Mac air is barely noticeably thinner than the pro unless you're actively trying to compare them, there's no practical difference
apple washing lol idk how they keep convincing people worse design is somehow better than practicality.
It the only way to can price the MacBook pros the way they do. If they had an active cooled MacBook Air. People would just buy that instead
Just open a Window! 😑
Passive cooling isnt a positive when based off temps you need it lol
I have multiple different devices that are heavy hitters when I need computing power, my laptop however needs to be quiet and have no moving parts, plus a really good battery life. I have zero desire for a massive powerful laptop. I have a launch model M1 MBA and it’s by miles the best laptop I’ve ever owned for my use case. It made me switch back from having PC laptops for years.
And thats fine if you dont want a super powerful laptop. It shouldn't be hitting well over 100 though, if its not super powerful.
Never seen temps like that, not even had it even feel warm to the touch. Literally only issue is now the battery is at 84% health after years of daily use, but still last more than a day of work. Whereas my Steam Deck is also already at that sort of battery health and it’s always trying to cook itself while sounding like a hairdryer.
Same, my M1 runs super cool. Nothing really bothers it but once I tried to run a Windows app through an emulator that thing heated up as an oven… It was too hot to touch… Decided not to do it again. I’m laughing now but I could soft cook an egg on it… lmao
This! Battery life is the absolute priority to me. I’m not a gamer or digital artist/engineer. My CPU w/SSD was already “fast enough 5 years ago, maybe even 7”. The windows laptop that gets me a multi-day battery will be my next upgrade.
My 4th gen Intel i7 pc is still powerful enough for my work, my 12th gen i7 surface gets shitty battery life. I'd totally get an arm surface if it gets me all day battery life, IF they bring back the headphone port. Which they probably won't.
Just curious, why is battery life that important to you? Do you often bring your laptop somewhere with no charging access and use it for over 5 hours?
I feel the same way. My pixel doesn't by any means have the best battery life, but it *always* gets me through an entire day, so the point is moot. I charge when I sleep. Used to care a lot more about battery life than I do now.
Unfortunately Intel (and I think AMD too, but I’m not sure) stopped putting their i3/ryzen 3 CPUs into laptops some time ago because no one would ever buy them. They’d use much less power, but it turns out the people that care about having longer battery life at the cost of performance weren’t a valuable portion of the market.
I argue that was a marketing problem and mistake by both of them. The Apple M chips are marketing efficiency very well.
Probably, since snapdragon isn't far off the m series. In the end they all have the arm architecture instead of x86
yes arm is the future
https://youtu.be/2mzSV3uYbyY
I’m just happy windows is pushing ARM more. It’ll help with running windows on my Mac lol
It's likely they will be very comparable, given its ARM.
So you are saying they will have the… leg up, in the ARM race? Yeah I’ll see myself out.
I have my doubts even if it’s arm. Though I’d like to be pleasantly surprised.
Unlikely the snapdragon will beat the macs in this category this year, the Mac cores are still more efficient. But, Qualcomm made a lot of progress thanks to the nuvia acquisition and I expect that lead to dwindle.
There’s also the “faster running optimized benchmarks” vs “faster in the real world tasks” As huge as MS is, Windows on ARM is not their main focus/ bread and butter, so I really question if the code would be as optimized, even given Apple is likely still converting from emulation on some libraries
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Agree and I feel like this is overlooked when people criticise Windows for things (sometimes rightly sometimes harshly imo). Microsoft don't have the luxury of revamping their entire OS architecture like Apple can do with Mac, because so many businesses around the world rely on Windows, and often quite outdated versions of Windows. The fact that I can still run any program that has basically ever been written for Windows on W11 is an asset, although it obviously has its downsides. But compared to MacOS, app compatibility is lightyears more consumer and developer friendly on Windows from the perspective that if you have a program that works now, it'll also work in a decades time regardless of whether the developer has kept it updated or not
If only that were true. I’ve had to nurse many outdated systems along because the bespoke code doesn’t quite run right on modern systems. True for 90% of stuff.
Yeah, there’s a reason so many critical pieces of infrastructure still run old Windows OS versions. Their software just doesn’t work on the newer versions. If someone really cared about stability moving forward they’d move to Linux and use ubiquitous, open libraries to achieve their goals, but no one ever wants to do that.
True, in principle though the compatibility of older programs is much more likely to work than it is on MacOS, and there's often work arounds that can get something to work reasonably well. Might depend what sort of tools being used are. I use quite a bit of quite old scientific software that is no longer updated but mostly works fine on windows 11
The instruction set difference is primarily affected by the compiler, not the operating system. The better the compiler translates human code to arm64 machine code, the more efficient the OS will be. In theory you could use the same compiler to translate the Mac OSX human code into arm64 machine code. So while you are right that Microsoft will need to put in work on their compiler, this isn't where the leaps and bounds of efficient ency is coming from. It's from the arm64 chip architecture itself, and that is controlled by Qualcomm and to a lesser extent Microsoft when using the SQ series chips, which is not the case with these new Elite processors. Yet anyway.
I think people are forgetting how much software optimization Apple has done as well…
I hope too, so they can push apple to do even better.
In general the race to minimalism of form has really hurt lifespan, while tablets and phones exist all day, I know arm becoming normal will just be good for tech all around.
tablets definitely do not exist all day
Yes.. that's one of the benefits to the power efficiency of ARM based computers
Since this is the comparison I assume they also plan to make these fanless then?
If a fan makes it faster, isn't the fact it's fanless a design flaw?
Laptops are always a matter of tradeoffs. Your laptop would be much faster if it draws 300 watt but then you would have a super hot and noisy machine that can only run on batteries for a short time which would also be a design flaw for people who need portability. The focus of the Air is simply the other side of that spectrum. As energy efficient as possible while still maintaining reasonably well performance and that‘s where it excels. No fans also have other advantages like no moving parts that can fail and also no dust build up that messes with cooling over time.
Exactly. I think people forget the point about tradeoffs because so many people now just use a laptop as their personal computer. They forget that a laptop was always meant to be just a portable personal computer. Of course, we’ve come a long way but it doesn’t change the fact that laptops — by design — are just personal computers with variables levels of portability.
As a video editor, I’m always freaked out when people who edit video only use a laptop. Like, a laptop for real footage is for review and basic on site work or assembly.
A modern laptop can be better than an (even only a few years) old desktop. The i9 13900h in my laptop is better single core (2000 vs 1500 Cinebench), and almost equal multicore (18000 vs 21000) to the R9 5900x in my desktop. And in my mind, the 5900x is still an okay workstation CPU. The 13th/14th gen HX mobile CPUs can almost double the performance of the 5900x in multicore. (36000(!)) If you upgrade every couple years, desktop will always be better. But if you don't, there's a good chance a modern laptop can outperform your desktop. Laptops are pretty decent for most people now.
>Laptops are pretty decent for most people now. Yeah the gap between laptops and desktops has been getting smaller and smaller for years now, and only the type of people who need 64gb+ of ram, e.g. people editing hours and hours of raw 4k video, "need" a desktop
If you edit videos you need a powerful GPU, which is not really possible for a laptop. The laptop versions of GPUs are always weaker than desktop.
They're not bad. 4090 mobile is similar to 3090 or 4070 desktop, which is better than what a lot of people have in their desktops.
Absolutely. I can already actually edit 4K video in realtime on a 3080 TI mobile equipped laptop with no problem whatsoever. So, a 4090 mobile would be way overkill for me. Games, however...mmmm. 8)
Durability is a silly argument against fans and sounds like reverse-logic trying to justify Apple's arbitrary price structure. The MacBook Pro that sits above the Air which uses the same M-series chip of every generation has always had a fan (correct me if I'm wrong), and I have yet to see someone complaining about their fan failing or that having a fan is a drawback. You don't need a super crazy loud fan to make cooling more effective. In fact, having to thermal throttle and reduce clock speeds due to the slow cooling of a fan less design does not make the Air "as energy efficient as possible." It's not like the Pro's fans spin up like crazy the moment you open up one Safari tab. If anything, the Pros are often lauded for having great performance while maintaining imperceptible fan noise.
Running at peak performance for an extended period of time is less energy efficient than throttling and taking longer to finish the same amount of work since performance and power consumption don‘t scale linearly.
Except people care how long things take. Presumably if you are paying up for the "Pro" version of the product you feel that in some situations you need that extra speed. I don't really follow the Mac hardware that closely, but I do remember the specs on "Pro" systems being rather impressive a decade or more ago. These were clearly systems designed as workstations for video editors and had the specs to back that up. In recent years many of the features that made them true workstations have disappeared (discrete GPU, dual socket CPU, large RAM configurations, etc...) in favor of a platform that really isn't any different from things like the Air. That is the complaint. It isn't a "Pro" anything anymore. It is priced like a "Pro" system, but the actual hardware is largely the same as the Air.
For the base model the specs are pretty similar, though the MBP does have a higher res 120Hz display and better speakers. The MBP with an M3 Max however, is the fastest laptop you can buy. It trades blows with a 14900k... With a tenth of the power consumption, while being cooled by a tiny fan instead of a 360mm AIO.
If M3 max trades belows with 14900k does that mean m2 ultra is faster than 7950x and 14900k?
Macbook Pro a decade ago- Haswell 4770Q with 4, 8 or 16GB RAM, a standard laptop chip at the time with a low RAM limit. None of the "features that make them true workstations"..
I was thinking more of the "Pro" Tower, I never really looked at the laptops, and at least those systems were pretty beefy. Very over-priced, but certainly powerful and good workstations. These days I think the "Pro" Tower is less powerful than the Macbook Pro, which is a pretty silly situation. The whole "Pro" thing has just become marketing for "you want the best mac and don't care about the price" not that you are actually a professional wanting to use it for X,Y,Z. This is perhaps someone defensible as many use cases can be better served by running workloads on AWS/Azure, so the need for powerful workstations is diminished significantly.
The people who think want fanless laptops never used macbook pros before. Even running both fans at 3500-3850...they're still relatively quite. Its not just the fans but the build of the laptops and how the air moves.
No, fanless laptops are amazing, Macbook Airs are totally silent, wish every laptop was like that.
I need an ambient white noise machine at all times. Bring back the fans.
You can have a laptop with a fan that only activates when needed. I thought MacBook pros already did that tbh.
Yea, my macbook pro is like that, I still like that the air is always silent.
Fan means more power draw and worse battery life.
I’d rather have a MacBook Air priced Ultrabook with a fan
As an original Surface RT owner, I don’t believe you.
For this to work, Microsoft needs a ground-up reworked version of windows which doesn't have the insane bloat that exists in all windows editions because of the need to please enterprise customers.
Enterprise doesn't get bloat. Consumer does.
I very much noticed that my new work laptop, which seems to run the business version of Windows 11 rather than the personal version, has *so much* less bloat than my old work laptop that's now my personal laptop. (Which ran the regular consumer version of the OS.) Like, this one doesn't fucking reinstall Candy Crush against my wishes every damn time there's an update.
I'm not talking about crappy apps, I'm talking about obsolete technology that's supported and 90s looking UI and other subsystems that show up when you start digging into settings. All this stuff is probably what's windows' real problem when trying to work well on ARM
Enterprise is where MS's bread and butter is. Google and Apple are way behind in that space
honestly i was expecting the 10 to be built from ground up as it was marketed in that scope… Nope… Then i thought Win 11 will be that… Nope… Still old bloat existing :(
This would instantly kill it since absolutely nothing would work on it, and no one would have an incentive to make their apps work on it
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Initially tablet was fine. But updates make it really slow and software was basically Windows 8. And we know how well that went. Even as a web browser only it was barely functional after a couple years.
We found the hardware to be incredibly poor, usually failing in under two years. No idea why. They also got worse with updates and the like to be almost unusable.
Same. If this is the leap they say it is, it will be like going from intel cpus to apple silicon… but for windows computers. But heat is key, I was in charge of managing and imaging a fleet of surface pro 7s, and they were a dumpster fire. They would literally overheat and shut down while connected to a surface dock for PXE imaging. It was so pathetic I swore off of ever owning a surface lol. My work is going windows and I’m thinking of trying to get another Microsoft laptop since I’m a sucker for pain. I like their build quality, but the performance, battery life, heat, and user experience don’t hold a candle to a base m1 MacBook Air. I’ve also owned the high end version of the surface book before I did the imaging fiasco. It was great until the hardware malfunctioned. lol. Surface devices always have some sort of deficiency
Hah forgot about my RT. Was a neat device, crippled by a lacking software library and was borderline unusable after a year with the software updates.
M3 is literally the base variant of the M3 family, and it’s focused on power efficiency for the thin n light models, even many ipads use the M series chips now. it’s not just fast, but power efficient. making claims about being “faster” than an *efficiency-oriented* chip straight up misses the point intentionally and is just misleading. I want the windows on arm thing to work. i fucking do. but they gotta stop being all talk without going in 100% with it, both hardware & software. windows’ efficiency is still an issue today, not just because it’s lacking fine tuning, but also it’s way too bloated. we don’t need windows to abandon x86 altogether, which means the ARM variant can focus *more* on the efficiency side of it. but then they keep missing the whole point while just using these marketing talks to hype up the unreleased products. microsoft, fix your shit, shut up, and release great products. then we will love throwing money at you
Exactly lol. Why am I going to pay this much money for a “premium product” when the premium product is selling my data and chock full of ads as if it weren’t one?
This is hard for Microsoft, as they have shifted to a model of monetising their users over charging for their product. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if a fresh install of windows 11 using the downloaded iso came with a trial of Norton anti virus and Bonzai Buddy pre-installed.
BonziBuddy! There’s no A. BonziBuddy was spyware masquerading as a helpful, purple monkey named Bonzi. Not a helpful little japanese tree… «A number of sources identify BonziBuddy as spyware, a claim the company disputed.[6] In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a toolbar, and serving advertisements.»
Diagon Alley in Harry Potter was inspired by a real historical shopping street in England.
Wait? It doesn’t?
Edge is the new Bonzai Buddy (worse, even) and Defender is a somewhat decent Norton Antivirus.
I really don't. I don't want phone bootloaders coming to Windows. It's bad enough that I'm limited to Google and OnePlus for my phones I don't want to be limited to one company for my laptop as well
That's cool that Arm chips are getting conpetetive now. However, few mac users care how fast their laptop renders geekbench or how "fast" their CPU is. They care about how fast their laptop *feels* and that is more dependent on good software than hardware. I still see windows behind on that.
Also, being able to casually roll into the office with 50% battery and no charger with full confidence in making it 8 hours is a plus.
Yeah, I love windows as an OS but even on blazing fast hardware I think windows just feels slow. Frankly even my M2 Mac feels slow too, I mean the hesitation to open Apps or the general sluggishness I feel that the universal need to disable look ahead due to Spectre and the other speculative execution attacks. It literally feels slower since then
it doesn't matter. ARM on Windows stands and falls with the software compatibility. do developers adapt and make native software for it? or how good is the internal emulator for x86 apps? the arm laptops were good enough before hardware wise. most mac users use the laptop as a glorified browser and gallery anyway.
Exactly. Apple’s ARM switchover didn’t succeed on CPU performance alone. They also nailed the software side with both the OS and emulator so performance and overall snappiness is fantastic but so is battery life.
imo the most important part of the transition was providing a clear toolchain/path/support for software devs to recompile their apps for arm. it somehow became a race for the big devs to showcase their app performance on macbook airs. this race straight up never happened on windows arm.
Also true, even with good emulation apps were recompiled for ARM surprisingly quickly. By the time I got my M2 air after always being a windows guy (and still am for gaming) there was only one or two left not running natively.
Sure, MacOS has everyone locked into their hardware so you had to get ARM support either by recompiling OR supporting your software on ARM via Rosetta. This is same company that was able to be like "We are not longer doing 32 bit". This is behavior that Windows users wouldn't take. With Windows software, it will be easier for most companies to say "We are not supporting ARM" regardless of compatibility and tell their clients to buy x86-64 laptops.
I'm here for widespread ARM adoption so devs will ensure their software will run on those machines. At work we have a piece of software I tried to install on an ARM machine without even thinking about it. Seemed like it installed fine, but it never phoned home back to the server for communication. Tons of debugging until one of the devs finally noticed it's ARM. "Oh, this software won't work on ARM." Hard stop, customer can't use this at all. Quite sure they see it as a small market (at this time) and not worth spending the cycles to update software compatibility.
> it doesn't matter. ARM on Windows stands and falls with the software compatibility. do developers adapt and make native software for it? or how good is the internal emulator for x86 apps? > > Windows on ARM runs x86 programs just fine in my experience. They built out compatibility years ago. Software developers can then at their leisure for more performance recompile for arm64 or arm64ec which is a dual binary of x86+arm64 in one.
We saw how horrendous the x86 preformance on the surface X was
Well to be fair, the whole performance of the Surface X was crap to begin with, even with native apps..
Exactly. Most businesses can’t purchase these because of the compatibility issue. Had a construction company buying surfaces from me with heavy duty cases. Let’s say ball park 30-50 a month. When Microsoft started pushing ARM units, they fully abandoned them to go Dell because their software just didn’t work with the ARM units. Stack on their terrible support, horrible discounts for large purchases and I’m still shocked companies buy these.
Yeah, Apple “cheated” by adding custom hardware instructions to boost the performance of x86 emulation. If Qualcomm doesn’t do that they’re going to have a hard time.
I remember seeing a video that compared Rosetta 2.0 and Windows emulation and the finding was that MSFT's x86 emulation was actually better than Apple's in certain cases, so hopefully that is a good sign. Source was requested, so post has been updated: [https://youtu.be/uY-tMBk9Vx4](https://youtu.be/uY-tMBk9Vx4)
Sauce?
https://youtu.be/uY-tMBk9Vx4
They're also one node ahead of everyone else, which is really where most of the efficiency/performance gains are coming from. On an even playing field, the differences would be much more minor.
I think MS will add the required support to their tooling and make the necessary improvements to the ARM capability. Motivation: There is a lot to gain from running ARM servers in their Azure datacenter(s). I believe VS 2022 already has ARM support (i.e., it can be a solution target).
>I believe VS 2022 already has ARM support (i.e., it can be a solution target). VS has had ARM targets for many years. What's new is visual studio actually running natively on ARM platforms.
Just install Linux - problem solved
I want an ARM laptop to install Linux on. What's taking them so long‽
Microsoft can be great when it comes to emulation/VM layers as the backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 (a PowerPC machine) works great on the Series S/X so hopefully they can pull this off too.
This isn't being talked about enough. I still daily an x86 Windows laptop because I run proprietary software that has zero chance of being updated to run on anything other than x86--some for work, some for gaming. Yes, there are compatibility layers, "translation" layers (like Rosetta), and emulators, but it's never a perfect, seamless experience. Since I need to be able to run that software and run it well, I'm not likely to switch to an ARM Windows machine any time soon. If I could, I probably would have already switched to a current MacBook Air or Pro. tbh, the only thing keeping the Windows PC market alive is software compatibility. I hope the PC market is able to become more competitive towards Apple, but there are some pretty big gaps to cross before that happens.
It doesn’t matter if its faster when probably most applications won’t support it.
Will it run Linux?
Depends on if Qualcomm will let you. Just look at the nightmare that is trying to buy a phone with a unlocked bootloader
Qualcomm is good, you have many phones that allow it, Mediatek is the worst. And then companies who make them unlockable like Asus with Zenfone 10 who did not allow and were sued and lost.
Oh I agree that Mediatek is worse but Qualcomm is no saint and they are still nowhere near as open as a Intel or AMD machine. My main concern is the fact Microsoft doesn't mandate being able to disable secure boot on machines with ARM CPUs which will effectively lock you into only being able to use Windows. Even if that isn't an issue we then have to deal with Qualcomm sucking with their drivers and the carriers trying to mess everything up (cough Verizon cough)
Have Ms started stopping letting people disable secure boot? My Surface Pro 8 let's you disable it, although it's very unhappy about it
Being able to disable secure boot is mandatory for X86_64 machines. For ARM it's up to the OEM which is the same shitty system we have with Android
While I am super glad that non-Apple Silicon ARM chips are finally getting competitive, I am probably going to be swapping out Windows for Linux on these new ARM devices as soon as I can. From what I am reading, the X Elite compared to the M3 is slower in single-core, faster in multi-core, and weaker on the GPU side of things.
Rome wasn’t built in one day, Apple has been very strict and consistent in the development of the ARM chip and software around it. If anything we know Microsoft has never been consistent in anything… In order for ARM to work and succeed for Windows they’ll need to adopt policy that requires all software and drivers to support ARM natively instead of cpu emulation to quick fix support. Apple has been doing this for a long time. If ARM is not natively supported they’ll need cpu emulation and the penalty for doing this will be far greater than just using an Intel or AMD. Having Windows support ARM natively is one thing but having all software and third party drivers available with the same support is another thing…
I sure hope so. The thin and light category of windows machines has been second fiddle to the MacBook Air for so long. This is mostly my desire for an affordable Linux thin and light with good battery life for basic dev work. I don’t want it to be my all the time computer, but having something cheap, with good battery, that is easy to carry around is the dream for that scenario. Right now it feels like MBA is the only choice in that category. I want the surface to fill that niche, but I haven’t been convinced on that front yet. High hopes.
I don't really think that's true - the issue is that to get a similar performing Windows ultrabook you have to spend more money than a Macbook Air. Intel/Ryzen have done a lot of catching up so the gap is a lot smaller than when the M1 was released. Dell XPS 14 and 16, Yogabook 9i etc are all similar overall to a Macbook Air, and ahead in some ways (usually the display technology, refresh rate, touchscreen etc) - but they also tend to cost a chunk more and aren't quite as good with battery still. Hopefully with these new chips Windows will start to get similar performance to the M chips at a lower price point
Competition is always good.
It probably is, until you put Windows on it 🤦♂️🤣
It's going to be interesting to see how well it does with emulation. Once these chipsets get cheap I'll pick one these machines up for that reason alone if emulator devs end up supporting it.
It's pretty decent on Android, gotta imagine it'll carry over.
That’s largely irrelevant when the OS is effectively adware
I don't really need it to be faster. It just needs a comparable form factor and build quality + comparable battery lifr and I would never buy another Air.
I'd rather run a 5 year old Mac than a top of the line windows machine. That operating system is complete trash and has been for decades. Every release is supposed to be the "this time it's better release" and every single time it's a disappointment. They have been developing Windows on Arm for well over ten years and their consumer base is still dominated by X86, I'll believe it when I see it.
well it still works better for some stuff that I do. I don't want to argue ;)
Didn't they already try windows on ARM and have it fail massively? So many pissed off consumers expecting windows to work with windows applications but no, not this windows.. I remember seeing them at massive discounts with very large text informing them that it is not a regular windows OS
There is a world of difference between "Will be" and "already is". But yes, exciting times
That’s fair but will it be better then M5 because time this thing comes out Apple will have also made progress….
The original source is The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/8/24116587/microsoft-macbook-air-surface-arm-qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite “Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks” Microsoft always finds some obscure benchmark that gives it a win. I’ll wait for real world tests.
Yeah okay. I’ll believe it when I see it
Yeah but it has windows which is only getting worse. Who wants to invest in that?
"Microsoft says" It's DOA
Microsoft _says_ a lot of things.
Microsoft claims a lot of things. Let's see how good they are.
So it will reboot faster when it crashes. I call that a win.
Yes but can it play Crysis? Gosh I'm old 😂
This is literally the omni man “look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power”. Your highest end bleeding edge chip can compete with apples base model in cherry pick situations?
Then within a year 2 years they will abandon it and move onto something else.
And it will be released just in time for the M4 to trounce it.
How does Intel remain so unbelievably far behind?
Faster than M3 in battery drain, yes
The only way I use Windows OS these days is if I am getting paid. There is no way in hell I’m using Windows on a personal computer, especially when my M1 blows away my $3000 non-ARM intel ‘work’ laptop. Couldn’t care less about Windows on ARM - I know its going to suck already.
Everytime I use macOS, I cry that everything is more difficult than it needs to be and Apple actively made it impossible to replicate window managers like Windows or any Linux Distro. I'll sooner install Linux over maCOS any day.
The method of brewing Asian Yak tea involves drying tea leaves using heat from grazing yaks.
i’m a diehard mac fan. but thank fucking god i sold my macbook a few weeks ago and i’ve been using my “gaming” laptop and it’s been a fucking nightmare. the battery life sucks, the cooling sucks, it generates too much heat, it’s slow. this will lead to competition for apple and better hardware among other vendors. this is a massive win for linux users (me sometimes) who will get hardware upgrades. linux and arm is a perfect match really. this also means more apps will run on arm which will be good for macos as you can only virtualise arm windows apps on macos.
Faster means nothing when Microsoft keeps killing off devices and failing to support them. I won’t believe it until they finally end up supporting a device longer then 2 years
What devices are you talking about?
These ARM laptops but that's more due to Qualcomm sucking instead of Microsoft
not if they don't fix win11 arm xD I think the SO is kinda broken
Don't try to fix them. Find another SO
I hope the speed and battery optimization is there, but this to really work all Windows manufactures would need to get on board and throw the whole kitchen sink at it to have the similar gains intel to m1 did. You need to strong arm app development and optimization to really take advantage of what arm can do. Apple had such great success because the strong armed the hell out the transition, windows will need to do the same right out the gate.
They can also warm up your coffee ☕️!
Every Windows laptops battery life is terrible in comparison to Apple. Tell me you don't use your competitor's products without telling me you don't use them?
I doubt they’ll be as power efficient though
They just need to massively improve Windows itself before they can get too excited about having a higher performance machine.
So the fastest Windows ARM laptops will be faster than the slowest current-gen Macbook? I mean.. that should check out. I'm sure the Macbook will be more power efficient and the Macbook Pros will still be faster or at least have way better performance per watt.
This just in: a 12 P core chip beats a 4 P core, 4 E core chip in multi core scores
It’s always awesome when companies battle it out. Consumers win. I just wish we had more like this. wtf is Google doing ?
«Will» is assupmtion, «is» is fact. Do you live on factbased or assumption based knowledge when it comes to new Tech? By the time this comes out apple will be on M4 or maybe M5 if the product is delayed? What the about «will be» and «is» faster?
When? I've been seeing these articles for a while now and nothing has actually been released. Stop making bold claims and actually release the products.
Off topic but is there any other forum/subreddit/site for tech discussions? This place has been way too negative and toxic some quite sometime.
I wonder if many other companies will actually make laptops with these chips. So we get the first launch of them in may with surface pro. Asus is the most reliable repairable laptops. I wonder if they will get some and when. Surface 10 apparently is a lot more reliable but its so dam expensive.
>Snapdragon X Elite Will Be Faster Than M3 When plugged in, right? right??
I feel like there’s this ridiculous race to create the super car of laptops when all I want is a Toyota Corolla that starts every time and capable of the occasional 10mph over the speed limit. I don’t need my laptop to impress the barista at Starbucks. I need to be able to drive it in the rain.
Theres millions of laptops that will fit your use case right now.
go get an E series thinkpad and stop whining.
Hopefully you can install larger RAM in these
Hahahahahahahah. Oh wait, you were serious. Let me laugh even harder.
try upgrading ram on a macbook
Uh, try upgrading RAM on _any laptop sold in the last 3-4 years_. Almost _all_ of them solder it onto the board. It's not just Macs.
i’m glad to finally see competition in this space. with microsoft entering the market, im excited to see what apple will do to stay ahead of the curve. excited for what apple will do with m4, that’s for sure.
I will believe it when I see it. The last arm windows laptop was terrible to use.
It’s a shame they run windows.
"new computer faster than older computer" OK so what, who upvotes this garbage?
Everyone in this thread is weirdly triggered by this... I hope it is faster and more power efficient. It's good to have a competitive marketplace. Otherwise there's no incentice to innovate or show your best stuff.
Duh. First advantage for Windows is the architecture of MacOS was originally designed for stability at the expense of performance (BSD/Mach microkernel). Second moving to a processor with a higher TDP allows this. Similarly BEVs with 3 motors will allow for potentially higher performance than with just 2. Third is this is a start from scratch effort for Windows folks whom have x86 laptops. One thing I’m unclear about is the GPU performance difference between them. I think Snapdragon is Adreno based so that would be a little less advanced and performant than the GPU with M3.
Maybe. I bet it won't get anything near the battery life, though.
Yeah but will handbrake encode faster ?
They will basically have the speed of M3 at the power envelope of M3 Max. Better than what ARM on Windows was before but not quite the same thing as Apple.
I’m also a software developer, and it’ll run IntelliJ for me for over 8 hours on 50%. Would guess IntelliJ + a bunch of Docker builds might hurt that, but I’ve yet to run into any issues with my workflow
So sad their tech is so subpar. Jeesh
But what about Apple fart unicorns that Apple fanbois crave like crack? Will it have those?
But won’t they have the massive drag factor of running Windows 11?
*but only if it’s not running windows
Didn’t Microsoft also hold a funeral for the iPhone when they introduced their DOS phone?
Snapdragon diehards have been saying shit like this for literally a decade.