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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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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.
The fun thing? There are many who are crying that these CAN'T play games. I am not sure but most of the thin and light laptops can't play games to begin with.
Microsoft explicitly compared these to MBA M3 and these laptops have fared extremely well against MBA M3.
It is such a sad state that people would turn the table to try to prove their narrative.
These laptops are great for the tasks that people would do on any thin and light laptop - and gaming or video editing isn't one of those things.
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.
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.
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.
Well I expected more since Qualcomm and Microsoft touted their benchmarks so I was hoping it would get closer in reality. Some benchmarks by some other YTer in their own "real world" did show better battery life than Macbook Air.
As for why this machine? Because I wanted to use the NPU if the apps would make use of it but it's so new, no one really is including Divici Resolve ARM native version. (still uses CPU to render, not even the GPU it seems). However, given the app issues and the next gen Intel / AMD chips will have close enbough TOPS. maybe I will just wait. Although I think general software support will still take a long time and developers probably have better dev kits already for upcoming Intel/AMD chips since they are x86.
I would use the Co-pilot for the GPT chat bits, not the co-drawing or the camera bits. Of course I can just open up co-pilot manually but I expect more local AI workload at some point. Just lowering my expectations. The issue I think I will run into is that Microsoff Office is a separate license and cost for AI enhancements and it may all be done in the cloud.
I did want the machine as a FAST Windows box that would be close to as snappy as a M3 Macbook Air which normal "chrome" usage would be good enough. Do I need fast chrome, no, I just don't like to wait for content to render.
I mean no one needs "faster", a slower machine can browse. the and run other apps just fine. Just want to. Could be a new Linux machine too but let's see how that goes.
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As for why this machine? Because I wanted to use the NPU if the apps would make use of it but it's so new, no one really is including Divici Resolve ARM native version. (still uses CPU to render, not even the GPU it seems). However, given the app issues and the next gen Intel / AMD chips will have close enbough TOPS. maybe I will just wait. Although I think general software support will still take a long time and developers probably have better dev kits already for upcoming Intel/AMD chips since they are x86.
I would use the Co-pilot for the GPT chat bits, not the co-drawing or the camera bits. Of course I can just open up co-pilot manually but I expect more local AI workload at some point. Just lowering my expectations. The issue I think I will run into is that Microsoff Office is a separate license and cost for AI enhancements and it may all be done in the cloud.
I did want the machine as a FAST Windows box that would be close to as snappy as a M3 Macbook Air which normal "chrome" usage would be good enough. Do I need fast chrome, no, I just don't like to wait for content to render.
I mean no one needs "faster", a slower machine can browse. the and run other apps just fine. Just want to. Could be a new Linux machine too but let's see how that goes.
It's a catch-22 situation here -- if people don't adapt the ARM approach to Windows then laptop makers won't make new models and it will just never take off. On the other hand, it's half-baked right now and people are lookie-loos and "just want it"...until they don't.
It's a catch-22 situation here -- if people don't adapt the ARM approach to Windows then laptop makers won't make new models and it will just never take off. On the other hand, it's half-baked right now and people are lookie-loos and "just want it"...until they don't.
I will wait for some open boxes at this point or wait for new version of Surface devices to see how they run on Intel/AMD's new chips.
Slow adoption predicted since I feel Microsoft is not in position like Apple who can say "no more x86 in XYZ years" so adoption of ARM could sloooooow as heck. Apple can say "FU" and get away with it but Microsoft cannot.
Way too many machines out there and too many HW/SW vendors that Microsoft has to placate and not alienate. Many of the software testing showed even vendor specific drivers were still x86. while this may be good news for PRISM, it's bad even samsung also did not port their own drivers to ARM64 haha and PRISM doesn't seem to be on par with Rosette 2 macOS yet.
I think it's a real shame but the existing mass installation of x86 hw and software vendors that can just stall ARM64...
The developers can't run VMWARE or other hypervisors yet either. I forgot who - josh something.. that YTer did more extensive software compatibility testing found that developers may not like ARM windows yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atIO4N7
The specs certainly put Apple Macbook Air to shame
120Hz vs 60hz
memory of 16GB vs 8
512 SSD size vs 256
If it's stuck/not showing, maybe try to use incognito or private browsing, log in, and see if that works?
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.
Apple obviously made this move on their M chips. As intrigued as I am by the technology, I've refused to buy one for this reason. There's no need to convert a quick, easy $80-SSD swap into an $500+ motherboard replacement.
At the risk of sounding quixotic, I'd push back on manufacturers who do stuff like this (by refusing to buy their products). Otherwise, it will just be a race to the bottom, much like it has been with soldered RAM.
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