Ask Paul: May 17 (Premium)

Happy Friday! It's been a crazy, busy week, and we have another crazy, busy week coming up. And you know what that means. It's time to kick off the weekend–and a brief respite for me–a bit early with another great set of reader questions.
Which Windows on Arm laptop?
jeroendegrebber asks:

Assuming the new Qualcomm Arm cpu will really deliver as promised, what daily driver laptop would you wish to get an Arm upgrade?

For whatever it's worth, I think we're past the speculation bit. The new Qualcomm chipsets will finally deliver a viable Arm-based alternative to x86, and my bigger question now is how quickly the industry will shift to this platform (meaning Arm, generally, not Qualcomm) entirely. Arm Holdings specifically mentioned that multiple chipmakers are working on Windows/PC-specific chips this past week, there hasn't been a single warning sign building up to the launch Monday, and just based on leaks, we can see that the PC market is embracing these chips in ways they never did previously. The future is just about here. Finally. Monday will be a big day.

In mainstream productivity laptops, which one might define as "laptops without a discrete GPU" where the market ranges from mid-level consumer models to premium business-class models, I can't think of a single laptop that would not benefit from this shift. In the x86 world, we have to deal with heat, fan noise, and decreasing battery life (an issue that doesn't get enough press, frankly, though everyone who reviews laptops will tell you this). Shifting these products to Arm will be similar to the shift from SDR (standard resolution) video to HD and then 4K–where it felt like we suddenly had new eyes–except that the benefits we'll experience will be battery life, silence, and no heat. This will be an ah-ha moment for everyone who experiences it. Just ask anyone who moved to an Apple Silicon-based MacBook.

Looking at what's in the room with me now, I see an HP Dragonfly Pro, one of my favorite laptops of all time, and am reminded that it has an AMD processor and custom power management system, co-designed by HP and AMD, that bypasses the system in Windows to work some magic. And that this laptop could be thinner, lighter, and quieter, with better battery life, by shifting to Arm, and that the resulting product would just run stock Windows (on Arm) and not require any special engineering to achieve HP's performance and efficiency goals.

I also have three Lenovo Yoga laptop/2-in-1s in for review, and two of them would benefit similarly to the Dragonfly Pro: These are well-made devices, but they suffer from their lackluster Intel Core Ultra innards, with the resulting heat/fan noise and battery life issues. An Arm chip would set them free. And Lenovo and its customers will both benefit from that when it happens. And it will happen.

When you move past the mainstream to the smaller but important markets for what I'll call prosumer/creator, gaming, developer/portable...