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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
Top Comments
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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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.
one of the reason lots of people stay with windows is the compatiblity.
Haven't tried the other programs in CC
My HP Printer works fine via WiFI.
I use a browser based VPN which works fine, I'll try a standalone app to see how that goes.
wow, maybe it's time to short INTL?
should just buy a macbook air
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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.
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wow, maybe it's time to short INTL?
1000+ most used apps are tested to work seamlessly. Many of them are natively supported. Some of them are still in beta stage, they will be available soon with native arm support so we can utilize 100% performance gains. Next year or so, mediatek and others are jumping into the game which will bring much more low price products.
Apps which I use are already supported.
chrome
whatsapp
microsoft suite
zoom
spotify
amazon prime video
photoshop
slack and more
Check here for more apps which are natively supported :
https://armrepo.ver.lt/
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.
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.
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I just bought the Book 4 Pro 360 and returned it - the track pad was abnormally large and the screen size caused overall poor support with the hinges (multiple YouTube videos noted this and I confirmed it in Beat Buy). I ordered a Galaxy Book 4 360 instead, which shouldn't won't have the flimsy hinge support OR the Adobe/Google Drive/etc issue.
If you have a trade in, I'd recommend purchasing through Samsung vs Best Buy. I was able to apply both the education discount (warning: they use ID.me to verify this now) and I got $327 for my iPad Mini 2 (LOL, yes the 2013 iPad Mini 2).
I'll report back once mine arrives if Intel chip has these issues too....I'm going to be very upset if it does
(I definitely don't plan to touch any of these arm beta devices for a decade or more. It's an experiment and mostly unnecessary with decent tablets and keyboard and Ryzen laptops)
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Share your experience with the Slickdeals community
Share information with the community. Please follow our Community Guidelines and be kind!