Copilot+ PCs and the ARM Windows moment.
Microsoft just launched Copilot+ PCs running Snapdragon X chips. The hardware is genuinely competitive with Apple Silicon. The software still has work to do — but the platform is real this time.
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
- 01Battery life. Genuinely all-day on the Surface Laptop 7. The thermal behaviour is dramatically calmer than Intel Windows laptops.
- 02Wake-from-sleep and overall responsiveness — finally feels like a phone, not a laptop.
- 03Native ARM builds of Edge, Chrome, VS Code, and most of the modern web tooling are now in place.
- 04Prism (the x86 emulation layer) is real progress over Windows 11's previous attempt. Most apps run; many run fine.
What still bites
- 01Anti-cheat in major games — kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't support ARM Windows yet. Casual gaming works; competitive gaming doesn't.
- 02Some printer drivers. Yes, in 2024.
- 03Bits of the developer toolchain — particularly Linux containers — are slower than on Apple Silicon.
- 04Plenty 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
- 01Test target for any cross-platform web project. ARM Windows is now its own performance profile.
- 02Browser performance regression checks — Snapdragon X is a different microarchitecture and we've already found one Chrome-on-ARM bug.
- 03Reference 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.