When It Just Works ⭐

In early 2024, I had my first hands-on experience with the Snapdragon X Elite, the Arm-based processor that changed everything. At that time, I was evaluating the 15-inch MacBook Air M3 ahead of experiencing the first Snapdragon X Elite-based PCs, which would go on to be announced as Copilot+ PCs about a month and a half later.

What’s happened since then is nothing short of astonishing. I immediately ordered a Snapdragon X Elite-based Surface Laptop 7, which remains my favorite overall laptop today. I’ve reviewed several Snapdragon X-based laptops over the past year, and I’m currently using a “low-end” HP OmniBook 5 16-inch laptop that’s powered by the slowest/lowest-end Snapdragon X there is, and it is a delight. My experiences with these PCs have been as consistent as they’ve been positive. It is clear to me that Arm is the future of the PC, and x86 cannot die off quickly enough. Everything else is just noise.

But there is part of the story of my first Snapdragon X Elite experience that didn’t make my write-up about that day. Mostly because it was off-topic to what I learned about the new PC chips. But it is very much on-topic in the context of why Snapdragon X is amazing and it has to do with a phrase popularized by Microsoft and Apple decades ago: It just works.

It cannot be overstated how important it is when something just works. And I write that with over three decades of experience with most things not working. That’s the dark underbelly of personal computing. There is so much promise, but there is also so much disappointment. It happens again and again and again.

That day in April 2024, I headed into New York City to attend a Qualcomm briefing about the Snapdragon X Elite and experience prototype laptops built using this platform. During the briefing portion, I did what I’ve done so much over the years: I pulled out my laptop, signed in, opened an app to take notes, and started documenting what I was learning.

But this was a little different. It was a Mac, not a Windows PC, and so I had to make a few minor concessions or changes with things like keyboard shortcuts. No big deal. But I was also using an iPhone at the time, and at one point, Qualcomm displayed a slide that was dense with information, and so I decided to take a photo of it instead of trying to write down everything on the slide. As I did so I was thinking about later downloading it to a computer and inserting it into the right place in my briefing notes.

It occurred to me then that I was using two Apple devices and that there must be a way to get the photo from the iPhone to Mac more seamlessly. As I considered this, I had a vague idea that perhaps I could just use Copy and Pate across the devices: I could copy the photo to the Clipboard on the iPhone and then paste it into the notes on the Mac. Maybe.

So I tried it. And it worked. Even though my Mac was on the Wi-Fi network and my iPhone was on cellular, this just worked. The photo on the phone...