Surface Pro X: ARM on Windows is here, almost.
Microsoft's first serious ARM laptop just shipped. The Snapdragon 8cx is fast, the battery is impressive, and the software story is exactly as broken as you'd expect.
Microsoft announced the Surface Pro X this month with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx — a custom ARM chip designed for laptops, not phones. It is genuinely the most ambitious ARM-on-Windows attempt yet. It is also still very much the first attempt.
The specs vs an Intel Surface Pro 7
| Surface Pro X | Surface Pro 7 | |
|---|---|---|
| Chip | Snapdragon 8cx (ARM) | Intel Core i5/i7 (x86) |
| Battery (claimed) | 13 hours | 10.5 hours |
| Weight | 774g | 775g |
| Cellular | LTE built-in | No |
| Cooling | Fanless | Fan in higher SKUs |
| x86 app support | Emulated, 32-bit only | Native |
What's good
- 01Battery life — Microsoft is claiming 13 hours and it's roughly truthful in real use.
- 02Always-connected LTE is genuinely useful for the demo and design crowd this device is aimed at.
- 03Fanless design, thin, light. A real piece of industrial work.
- 04Office, Edge, native UWP apps run fast and look good.
What's broken
- 01x86 emulation is slow and battery-hungry — and most Windows software is still x86.
- 0264-bit x64 apps don't run at all on launch. Only 32-bit x86 emulation works.
- 03Chrome on ARM isn't quite there yet. Edge is excellent but most users want Chrome.
- 04Game support is essentially nonexistent.
- 05Most pro creative software (Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom) runs only under emulation, badly.
ARM on Windows has the same chicken-and-egg problem ARM-on-anywhere has always had — developers won't recompile until users arrive; users won't arrive until developers recompile.
What it tells us
Qualcomm has built a real laptop chip. Microsoft has built a real ARM Windows. The bottleneck is the software ecosystem. ARM on Windows has the same chicken-and-egg problem ARM-on-anywhere has always had — developers won't recompile until users arrive; users won't arrive until developers recompile.
We'd watch this category for the next two years. If Apple really does move the Mac to its own silicon (the rumour mill is loud right now), Microsoft and Qualcomm get an enormous tailwind. Without that catalyst, this is a niche corporate-laptop play.