Ask Paul: November 8 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And welcome to a monster installment of Ask Paul with a terrific collection of reader questions to kick off the weekend.

Also, my test mug purchase from the Thurrott swag store finally arrived.  It's ... fine.

Windows Android something something
helix2301 asks:

Did you ever review that laptop that came with Android tablet any everything? Maybe I missed it?

I have two more hardware reviews to finish before we come back from Mexico in 11 days, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition and the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, which is the laptop you're referring to. Normally, I'd finish the ThinkBook Plus review first, because it's the next one chronologically, but Lenovo sent the Yoga Slim here, to Mexico, so I need to ship that back before we leave here. So that's next, and I should have that review up sometime this weekend.

I had hoped to be more timely on these, but it's been an incredibly busy month, much worse than expected. I had come into this trip hoping to make big progress on two books, the Windows 11 Field Guide updates for 24H2 and the Eternal Spring book my wife and I are writing. And I've/we've done that, actually, it's pretty impressive on some level. But it's also been more work and time than expected and here we are six weeks into this trip and I feel like I've still behind on all of it. Anyway. Yes, it will happen.
Best Arm laptop
helix2301 asks:

Do you still think best arm laptop is mac?

It's difficult to make such a general assertion. Because of macOS alone, the MacBook Air will never be the "best" laptop, Arm or otherwise ... to me. But I think what you're really asking is where things stand with performance, battery life, efficiency, reliability, and instant-on. And that's been a big focus for me this year. What I can say with certainty is that Microsoft and Qualcomm finally offer a platform in Windows 11 on Arm + Snapdragon X that achieves two miraculous feats: It works well enough (compatibility + performance) for mainstream Windows users to make the switch, and it offers a compelling response to the Apple Silicon-based MacBooks. It's incredible that this happened all at once and sort of out of nowhere; the platform was previously so bad it was the butt of jokes.

But these things are moving targets. The M4 family obviously raises the bar yet again, and Qualcomm didn't announce a second generation Snapdragon X at its annual event in October. So we'll see where it goes. But looking at the laptops I have used this year, the MacBook Air M3 offers better battery life and efficiency than any Windows laptop, Arm or otherwise. The Snapdragon X laptops come close--about 11 hours of battery life on average, vs. 15 for the MacBook Air--and that's good enough. They have fans, as everyone points out, but that's rarely an issue, and is literally never an issue with the Surface Laptop 7 I purchased. That, to me, is the "best" Arm laptop, it's my favorite laptop overall from 2024. The HP...