Reliability Matters (Premium)

I've spent the past several weeks using two nearly identical x86-based laptops side-by-side. And I have some thoughts, mostly about reliability, as this is a concern that's come up again and again in my reviews.

To be clear, this isn't really about these two specific laptops. I typically review over 20 laptops each year, and I've been building an understanding of where each processor maker--Intel, AMD, and, now, Qualcomm--is with their respective products. And how their respective processor architectures--x86 and now Arm--compare.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X is a revelation. Some mistakenly believe that this chip is somehow several generations in, and that it took Qualcomm--and Microsoft, which delivers the necessary software platform advances--almost a decade to be competitive on PCs. But Snapdragon X is a new architecture, the result of an acquisition, and while it did take a few years to come to market, the results are much better than anyone expected. So much so that Qualcomm has since begun shifting its much higher volume mobile chips over to this new architecture as well.

And while there are many ways in which one might compare chips like these, or the PCs that are built around them, the central issue I keep coming back to is perhaps best summed up by a single word.

Reliability.

Reliability is an interesting thing, and using the Intel- and AMD-based OmniBook X Flip laptops side-by-side over the past several weeks was enough recent experience to help me clarify my views on where x86 is in general and where current-generation Intel and AMD chips land on a spectrum. And it's not pretty.

Generally, x86, whether it's Intel or AMD, is less reliable than Snapdragon X/Arm across the board.

One obvious example is the experience you get opening the laptop lid. There's some amount of time it takes for the display to come on and then some more time for the webcam to wake up, see you, and sign you in, or fail and prompt for a PIN. I think of this process as instant-on reliability.

Snapdragon X/Arm instant-on is almost universally immediate and highly reliable, with the system slipping back into a wake-from-sleep, short boot process only after several days of inactivity. In other words, with Snapdragon X, instant-on actually works.

With x86, the instant-on experience is like spinning a roulette wheel in that you could get almost anything. Sometimes it just works. Sometimes, there's a short boot process, and then the webcam works well. Sometimes it comes right on, but the webcam never initiates correctly, and you have to use a PIN (this is perhaps most common). Sometimes it sits there, doing nothing for several seconds, and then it finally launches into a full boot process as if the PC had been shut off. Predicting which you'll get is impossible, and the time the laptop sat there unused before you opened the lid doesn't really matter. You could have used it last night, and you'll still get a full boot sequence the next morning...