They Did It (Premium)

Two weeks ago today, Microsoft and its PC maker partners launched the first Snapdragon X-based PCs, kicking off a new era for Windows and the PC with the unfortunately named Copilot+ PCs. Opinions are like, well, you know: Everyone has one. But what the conspiracy theorists seem to miss or at least ignore is that something wonderful just happened.

They did it.

They f#$%ing did it.

Yes, the jury is still out on some of the details. Reviewers have only had a limited subset of the available Copilot+ PCs—I really don’t like that name—for a short period of time, me less so than some thanks to my ill-timed June travel. As I keep pointing out, as much for my own sake as yours, these things take time. But even the harshest critic can see what’s happening. And that thing is overwhelmingly positive.

I came into 2024 determined to figure this out. So determined that I started spending my own money on expensive new computers. Knowing that Qualcomm had identified mid-year as the time for the first Snapdragon X-based PCs, I got a 15-inch MacBook Air M3 and used it so much I started to get nervous. Despite the dozens of Macs I’ve owned over the past 20+ years, despite it being the third M-series Mac to come into my home, something clicked this time. I got over my user experience issues with macOS and embraced its sometimes weird way of doing things. And I did that because the MacBook Air is special. And because this was clearly Microsoft’s and Qualcomm’s target.

Of course, the MacBook Air has an Achilles Heel: It’s a Mac. As good as it is, as magical as it is, the MacBook Air is held back by some bizarre Apple design decisions, many of them related to multitasking. That this is the same basic issue with the iPad Pro is interesting on some level, but it doesn’t really matter: Apple has incredibly powerful and efficient hardware, but it can’t seem to get out of its own way and acknowledge that thinking different doesn’t always have to mean being different. There are good ideas out there, maybe embrace a few of them.

After a few months of full MacBook Air immersion, I wanted only one thing: That computer, but running Windows 11. I wanted all the things that were good about the MacBook Air—the silent, effortless performance, the amazing battery life and efficiency, the impossibly consistent reliability—with none of the bad, meaning without macOS.

This experience colored my experiences with review PCs, all of which recently based on Intel’s woeful “Meteor Lake” platform. Meteor Lake is a step towards the future that Intel has ignored for decades, but it’s about to take a major leap forward with “Lunar Lake,” and the current PCs will be remembered only for their jet-engine fan noise, their non-existent NPU capabilities, and their unbelievable reliability issues. Each time I fired up one of these machines, I stewed, and not always silently. It was like living in the past.

As the first several months of 2024 ticked by, I braced for the worst. Every leaked benchmark, every rumor with credible sources, was overwhelmingly positive. In April, I was able to go hands-on with some prototype Qualcomm laptops, and that only amplified the good news: Everything we saw in New York that day looked fantastic. And in May, Microsoft announced the first Copilot+ PCs—again, groan—and that they would start shipping June 18. I walked through the product showcase after the announcement in a bit of daze, frankly. It didn’t seem possible.

There were some hitches, of course.

Microsoft’s strategic pivot on AI had infected this platform with some local AI capabilities, most of which didn’t seem like major differentiators. I discovered after that product showcase that all these Snapdragon X-based PCs—not most, but all—required active cooling, ending the dream of a MacBook Air-like silent PC experience. (And to be honest, I was most upset with myself: I had been so taken with all the positives I saw, in both April and May, that it somehow never once occurred to me to even ask about this.) And then there was the unfortunate and last-minute Recall controversy, which at least ended well: Now, Microsoft will at least test this major privacy ask ahead of shipping it to the public, something it should have done in the first place.

But in the end, Snapdragon X has finally delivered on the original promise of Windows on Arm. Not by itself—this success required several years of Microsoft software innovations that included but are not limited to its x64 software emulation, major improvements to that emulator, Auto SR (automatic super resolution) technologies, and architectural optimizations in Windows—of course, and not without a lot of waiting and broken promises. But that terrible past, which stretches back fully 12 years if we include Windows RT, and we should, has been swept away in a blur of feel-goods.

I’ve only had a Snapdragon X-based PC of my own to review for one week, though it feels like months. I’ve been using a second Snapdragon X-based PC, a high-end Surface Pro 7 I also purchased with my own money, since last Saturday night. And I expect a third model, an HP, to arrive this week. But I’ve spent all 12 of those years I mentioned waiting for an Arm-based version of Windows to make any sense at all. And today, for the first time, it happened. And I’m calling it.

Nothing is perfect. Everyone who reads this site seems to have at least one esoteric app or bizarre hardware peripheral that serves as a compatibility blocker, and I’m sure I’ll hear from every one of them now. But that’s not been my experience. With one exception—Google Drive, which will be rectified despite comments to the contrary that were made years ago—everything I use, hardware and software, works just fine with Windows 11 on Arm today and runs terrific on Snapdragon X hardware.

Will I discover some other exceptions in the future? Yeah, maybe. But we need to get past the pedantic and put this in perspective. When Windows RT launched in 2012, it could not run any desktop software that didn’t ship in the box, and even though Office 2013 was included, Microsoft omitted Outlook because it ran so many background processes that it killed a PC’s battery life by two hours. When Windows 10 on Arm launched in 2017, it could run x86 PC apps in emulation, but only 32-bit apps and then incredibly slowly, and hardware compatibility was terrible beyond the basics.

Today, almost everything works. And works well. And while battery life remains an open issue—this is one of the “jury is out” things I referred to up front—it’s going to land in a good place. How good? We don’t know yet. But good.

And yet, we aren’t giving Microsoft and Qualcomm enough credit for this feat.

This is the same perception problem Microsoft and its hardware partners have always had, oddly. I was at a party in San Francisco in the 1990s, and some Apple fan was babbling about how great the company’s engineers were and how they made the engineers on Windows look like jerks. I asked him what he meant by that, and he said that Macs were far more reliable than Windows PCs. My response to that was immediate: That’s ridiculous, I said. There is only one Mac hardware platform with several models, and making those computers work reliably is easy. Meanwhile, Windows has to run on literally millions of combinations of hardware components; the fact that Windows PCs boot up successfully every day, all around the world, and we all use them to get real work done is a miracle. Clearly, Microsoft has the better engineers.

If you flash forward to 2024, one of the big stories is that where Microsoft is adding Arm to the mix and keeping x64, Apple has made yet another successful hardware transition, in this case from Intel to Apple Silicon. That this transition was impressive and successful isn’t debatable, it’s both. But lost in this discussion is that Apple is literally leaving Intel/x64 behind. It’s not using both going forward. And so that kind of transition is, in many ways, much easier than supporting multiple platforms. What Microsoft is doing, which is driven by the unique realities of the business, is more difficult. And yet here it is: Windows 11 running on Arm-based Snapdragon X processors just works. This, too, is a miracle. (I won’t claim that Microsoft’s engineers are “better” than Apple’s today, just that this work is impressive.)

It’s easy to be cynical. I have had enough bad experiences, heaped on me again and again, to understand this. But we should not lose sight of what Microsoft and Qualcomm accomplished here. We don’t know what the future holds, but we can know this much: If Intel or AMD or some other chipmaker somehow defeat Qualcomm in the future by building processors that offer a better combination of performance, compatibility, and efficiency, that will only happen because Microsoft and Qualcomm did this work in the first place. Anyone who knows Intel, in particular, knows that this company would have continued ignoring Microsoft’s increasingly urgent cries to embrace mobility and efficiency otherwise.

Put another way, the PC was spiraling, circling the drain. And now it’s not. It’s that simple.

Windows 11 on Arm and the Snapdragon X chips don’t solve all the problems. They don’t address the all too real enshittification of Windows or the bad behaviors Microsoft now allows in its manic bid for AI domination. They don’t yet address the high ends of the market, like PC gaming or workstations, focusing as they should, for now, on the mainstream. But this platform is like a breath of fresh air regardless, a powerful, efficient, and, yes, quiet new kind of PC that runs the software we all refused to abandon and runs it well.

One week is not enough time to tell you whether a particular PC or other device is worth your hard-earned money. But having spent over 20 years reviewing PCs and waiting impatiently for this platform shift to happen in a meaningful way, I’m well-versed in what Windows 11 on Arm and Snapdragon X needed to accomplish to change our little corner of the world. And in this case, one week is absolutely enough time.

They did it.

They f#$%ing did it.