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Item 1 of 5
expiredDr.W posted Jul 8, 2024 5:27 AM
Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge Laptop: Snapdragon X Elite, 14" 1800p AMOLED Touch, 16GB RAM
$1,000
$1,350
25% off
& More + Free Shippingat Best Buy
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ARM native apps will run a bit better than on top tier AMD/Intel Laptop CPUs. There are many ARM apps out there already, mostly because this isn't the first Windows ARM device, so there's been several years of development opportunity which should accelerate as these devices get more popular.
I probably have 3-4 apps running under emulation on average. Rustdesk, Discord, and Skype. The rest I have native ARM apps for.
If an app requires a driver, such as a file system driver, it will not work under emulation, such as:
-Google Drive, requires an ARM file system driver, RaiDrive can be used as an alternative.
-Android Emulator used for Android Development on Windows (Google seems to hate ARM Windows at the moment)
Good list of known ARM Native apps:
https://armrepo.ver.lt/
Anything that runs under emulation will take a 10% to 25% performance hit.
Don't buy if you want to play modern games, which is basically hit or miss as they improve emulation/drivers. There's already been a couple of firmware and GPU updates that have improved game compatibility and performance. so it will get better over time. However these aren't really for gaming. The GPU isn't that impressive compared to current AMD/Intel offerings. So if modern gaming is important to you, avoid ARM Windows. If you only care about a specific game you can look up its compatibility and performance. Any game that uses cheat protection requires an ARM driver and can't be emulated, which no one has bothered to make yet, so those won't work.
Don't buy if you have weird/old esoteric hardware you need to support such as old printers or specialty devices that require drivers. It picked up my 8 year old wireless Brother multifunction printer/scanner with no effort, your milage may vary.
Nord and Express VPN don't have clients that work on ARM, but you can connect via the ARM OpenVPN client as a work-around to get basic functionality. Express VPN has announced they are working on a ARM native client. VPN worked fine with my standard work VPN via the built-in Windows VPN client, but if you have a specialty VPN client it may not work.
Edit: According to this article, here's the state of work-in-progress ARM clients for ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and PIA:
https://www.androidauth
Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom have ARM native clients, the rest will work in emulation mode, but only Photoshop and Lightroom are currently listed in the cloud installer app. Adobe has announced the rest of the suite should be available in the cloud installer sometime in July of this year.
Development work:
I use x86 git (ARM version in beta) and it works fine in emulation.
I installed Windows Subystem for Linux which gives me an ARM Ubuntu command line, works well.
Windows Subsystem for Android has been discontinued, and not even hacked versions work with the new Snapdragon CPUs currently or ever.
Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio Code have native ARM builds that work great.
SQL Server Management Studio works fine in emulation.
SQL Server does not work under ARM, there's is a specialized script that has been created to install SQL Express and have it run in emulation, seems to work fine
=====
Edit:
SQL Server Express and Developer edition ARM compatible install builds/scripts can be found here:
https://github.com/jimm98y/MSSQLE...M1-Install
Using the custom SQL Server 2022 Developer Edition installer seems to work with some post install steps.
A.) Had to run SQL Server Management Studio as an Administrator to be able to connect via integrated Windows Authentication
B.) Had to apply the following registry modification to enable connecting via TCP via the default (1433) port:
https://github.com/jimm98y/MSSQLE...l/issues/4
=====
This is if you want a virtually silent, fast, light laptop with great battery life.
Of the apps I run I have not had one crash.
I purchased the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.
+++Virtually silent, great overall performance, lightweight, doesn't get hot
+Amazing 90hz OLED touch Screen, 500 nits in SDR, and up to 1000 nits in HDR
+Amazing keyboard
+Three Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports
+Charges via USB-C
-Soldered memory
+Upgrading from 16GB to 32GB of memory only cost $69, compared to $400 that Apple charges.
-Very glossy/reflective screen, but works fine in my indoor lighting conditions
-No HDMI port/headphone jack/or SD Card reader, all can be remedied with a cheap dongle, I only have one dongle, a Pluggable 2.5GB Ethernet adapter with USB-C power passthrough.
+-"Good" trackpad, big, but uses mechanical instead of a haptic feedback click
This is the best Ultrabook I've owned, I've owned fanless and light Ultrabooks in the past like the LG Gram and HP Spectre x360, but they got really hot and sometimes would freeze up or have loud fans.
The ASUS Vivobook S 15 with X Elite has upgradable SSD.
The Dell XPS 13 with Snapdragon X Elite also has upgradable SSD.
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171 Comments
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Did you know Microsoft also did not release the Development Kit in time so developers had to go buy an actual ARM machine from bestbuy to test their software? Also, the latest Windows 11 was ahead of the SDK so they couldn't really confirm if everything will work? Microsoft is just stupid and half-assed what could have been the Apple Silicon Moment for MSFT
Issues I have with these machines
Display differences, some do have OLED and 120Hz so that's awesome here.
Battery life is a mix bag though, some will be great, some sucks. HP Omni I think was one of the worst.
Performance varies so much with the Best Performance, Recommended and fiddling.
The fan noise also varies so much between all of the machines
App support is just terrible like you said. Even some Native ARM are still not ready and NPU usage is non-existent yet for many things I want such as LLM use. LM studio was still using CPU only which affects my use. MacBook can use the GPU when I am just doing productivity work in parallel but ARM Windows will be pegged until apps are written to use the NPU.
No one seems to use the AI features. I don't use Windows for work so I won't benefit from the camera tricks and eye-following feature. The last time I had to draw a picture, never, diagram yes. Maybe I diagrams will work but there are already apps that does diagrams much better and I need to re-arrange stuff and can't be doing diagrams in a JPG!
POOR GAMING - it's basically shit, you can't even run most of the games at all. and Microsoft's own game center does not even work. WTF is Microsoft thinking.
Seems like Surface Laptop 7 is the best of the lot. I love a Surface Pro 11 but keyboard at $350 is silly for a Windows machine lol. (I did not get the M4 iPad pro Magic keyboard either due to price). It's nuts to pay 33% on a god damn keyboard when Surface Laptop 7 comes with it for free haha. Most of the time I use my Surfaced Pro as a "laptop" anyway since 2lb is hard to hand-hold for a long time.
I still love the Apple eco since I have rest of the apple gear but ARM Windows was gonna get me a 2nd machine to play around with. Will use my Surface Laptop 3 until I find something better. I got so many Windows machines I should sell them. Dell XPS 13 1260p needs to get used but it just feels...slow for some reason at times. f
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More importantly means you cannot upgrade the drive. with 2 TB NVME drives getting so cheap nowadays i'd not go for it if you need more space or think you might upgrade in the future.
eUFS is just an embedded SSD. I guess all drives are technically used as memory if your ram is full and the drive is used as a page file. eUFS would be way worse than a modern NMVE since its about 2-3 times slower
Issues I have with these machines
Display differences, some do have OLED and 120Hz so that's awesome here.
Battery life is a mix bag though, some will be great, some sucks. HP Omni I think was one of the worst.
Performance varies so much with the Best Performance, Recommended and fiddling.
The fan noise also varies so much between all of the machines
App support is just terrible like you said. Even some Native ARM are still not ready and NPU usage is non-existent yet for many things I want such as LLM use. LM studio was still using CPU only which affects my use. MacBook can use the GPU when I am just doing productivity work in parallel but ARM Windows will be pegged until apps are written to use the NPU.
No one seems to use the AI features. I don't use Windows for work so I won't benefit from the camera tricks and eye-following feature. The last time I had to draw a picture, never, diagram yes. Maybe I diagrams will work but there are already apps that does diagrams much better and I need to re-arrange stuff and can't be doing diagrams in a JPG!
POOR GAMING - it's basically shit, you can't even run most of the games at all. and Microsoft's own game center does not even work. WTF is Microsoft thinking.
Seems like Surface Laptop 7 is the best of the lot. I love a Surface Pro 11 but keyboard at $350 is silly for a Windows machine lol. (I did not get the M4 iPad pro Magic keyboard either due to price). It's nuts to pay 33% on a god damn keyboard when Surface Laptop 7 comes with it for free haha. Most of the time I use my Surfaced Pro as a "laptop" anyway since 2lb is hard to hand-hold for a long time.
I still love the Apple eco since I have rest of the apple gear but ARM Windows was gonna get me a 2nd machine to play around with. Will use my Surface Laptop 3 until I find something better. I got so many Windows machines I should sell them. Dell XPS 13 1260p needs to get used but it just feels...slow for some reason at times. f
App support is an evolutionary thing. It will improve.
The last couple issues fall under the "buy the right tool for the job" category. If you don't use AI and want a gaming PC, then buy a gaming laptop or an office laptop that does everything you want. Why would you want a Copilot+ PC if you don't use Copilot? Don't buy a screwdriver when you need a hammer.
More importantly means you cannot upgrade the drive. with 2 TB NVME drives getting so cheap nowadays i'd not go for it if you need more space or think you might upgrade in the future.
Despite this fire-sale price, I'd never buy this Samsung because of this. Almost all the other Snapdragon X Elite laptops have removable storage.
Despite this fire-sale price, I'd never buy this Samsung because of this. Almost all the other Snapdragon X Elite laptops have removable storage.
The shorter drives are slower and more expensive then their 2280 counterparts
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Despite this fire-sale price, I'd never buy this Samsung because of this. Almost all the other Snapdragon X Elite laptops have removable storage.
Cant find any reviews that go that far in depth, but havent read all the reviews out there. I'd be fine with taking a performance hit for efficiency on an ultrabook, but if its less efficient and slower that is a disaster.
Cant find any reviews that go that far in depth, but havent read all the reviews out there. I'd be fine with taking a performance hit for efficiency on an ultrabook, but if its less efficient and slower that is a disaster.
It just seems the wrong thing to use in a high-performance laptop. Apple pulled something like this when they went to a single-chip SSD and SSD performance tanked compared to previous (and future) models.
Just wait for Lunar Lake
The shorter drives are slower and more expensive then their 2280 counterparts
Dell XPS 13 9345:
https://dl.dell.com/content/manua...uage=en-us
ASUS S15 Snapdragon:
https://youtu.be/CIpODtZB7o4?si=
UPDATE: The HP Omnibook X is also outfitted with a 2280 m.2 slot:
https://youtu.be/RBla446r1I4?si=
What led you to be so sure when it's clearly not true? Did you do any research at all?
I have tried one myself and watched countless reviews and would NOT recommend people buy these Snapdragon laptops running Windows on ARM at this point. There are simply way too many software issues.
Since these laptops use ARM nearly every application (99.999%) needs to be emulated through Windows PRISM. Emulation performance and compatibility isnt good. The benchmarks most reviewers use like Geekbench and Cinebench 2024 are native ARM apps so they show the best case scenario, not the realistic scenario youll be experiencing since most apps arent native ARM apps. They are also missing the AVX2 instruction set, a commonly used instruction that a good amount of applications and games require.
I could do a very long write up of all the problems these Snapdragon laptops have, but nobody wants to read an essay on slickdeals. So long story short, do not buy these at all if you want to do any gaming, do not buy these if you use older or obscure programs, do not buy these if your work requires you to use specific work oriented applications, do not buy these if your VPN requires software, do not buy these if you have a variety of peripherals that need software (people are having problems printers, wireless mice, wireless gaming headphones, etc).
So who are these laptops good for? People that have basic and limited use cases. If you treat these like a Chromebook and stick to web browsing, video watching, Office applications, then you wont have any problems.
It's hard to even remotely recommend these laptops at $1000 when the software situation is so bad. It will eventually improve, but Microsoft has been working on Windows on ARM for over a decade (remember Windows RT?) and this is Qualcomms third attempt at Windows laptops. So dont expect the software issues to get fixed in a month or 6 months. With the sales being so poor, most developers wont even consider porting their applications to ARM. Remember Intel and AMD combined sell over 150 million x86 computers a year, Snapdragon laptops will be lucky if they sell 1M units this year, so developers can safely ignore them.
Ultimately, I recommend just buying a discounted Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) or AMD Zen 4 laptop, they sell for cheaper with similar specs. Battery life wont be as good, but we are talking about like 10 hours vs 12 hours. Alternatively if you want the best battery life then wait for Intel's Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) coming in a couple months, it uses the latest TSMC node and is designed like Apple's M-series chips so battery life should be amazing, and with no software issues since its still x86.
Dell XPS 13 9345:
https://dl.dell.com/content/manua...uage=en-us [dell.com]
ASUS S15 Snapdragon:
https://youtu.be/CIpODtZB7o4?si=K...J_-R&t=287 [youtu.be]
UPDATE: The HP Omnibook X is also outfitted with a 2280 m.2 slot:
https://youtu.be/RBla446r1I4?si=i...wUZQ&t=294 [youtu.be]
What led you to be so sure when it's clearly not true?
Interestingly the non snapdragon versions of the galaxy book and slim x have short drives when the intel/amd version have 2280 slots. And the intel Book4 even has an additional free 2280 slot so you can put in two NVME drives. I wish the Edge had this as well
I have tried one myself and watched countless reviews and would NOT recommend people buy these Snapdragon laptops running Windows on ARM at this point. There are simply way too many software issues.
Since these laptops use ARM nearly every application (99.999%) needs to be emulated through Windows PRISM. Emulation performance and compatibility isnt good. The benchmarks most reviewers use like Geekbench and Cinebench 2024 are native ARM apps so they show the best case scenario, not the realistic scenario youll be experiencing since most apps arent native ARM apps. They are also missing the AVX2 instruction set, a commonly used instruction that a good amount of applications and games require.
I could do a very long write up of all the problems these Snapdragon laptops have, but nobody wants to read an essay on slickdeals. So long story short, do not buy these at all if you want to do any gaming, do not buy these if you use older or obscure programs, do not buy these if your work requires you to use specific work oriented applications, do not buy these if your VPN requires software, do not buy these if you have a variety of peripherals that need software (people are having problems printers, wireless mice, wireless gaming headphones, etc).
So who are these laptops good for? People that have basic and limited use cases. If you treat these like a Chromebook and stick to web browsing, video watching, Office applications, then you wont have any problems.
It's hard to even remotely recommend these laptops at $1000 when the software situation is so bad. It will eventually improve, but Microsoft has been working on Windows on ARM for over a decade (remember Windows RT?) and this is Qualcomms third attempt at Windows laptops. So dont expect the software issues to get fixed in a month or 6 months. With the sales being so poor, most developers wont even consider porting their applications to ARM. Remember Intel and AMD combined sell over 150 million x86 computers a year, Snapdragon laptops will be lucky if they sell 1M units this year, so developers can safely ignore them.
Ultimately, I recommend just buying a discounted Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) or AMD Zen 4 laptop, they sell for cheaper with similar specs. Battery life wont be as good, but we are talking about like 10 hours vs 12 hours. Alternatively if you want the best battery life then wait for Intel's Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) coming in a couple months, it uses the latest TSMC node and is designed like Apple's M-series chips so battery life should be amazing, and with no software issues since its still x86.
Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine people using statistics pulled from thin air.
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