We have a test environment but it’s a hot mess. All the data is made up and extremely low quality. All the things you would normally interface with are also in test, but getting other teams to coordinate testing in the test space is… a chore. We do the best we can with mock services, but without having real services or representative data some of the data pattern assumptions don’t play out. Leaders value writing code and our lack of architects that span teams mean that when team architects either don’t meet ahead of time, make assumptions, or don’t ever agree on a design then…

We always host UAT. We also track logins. Guess how many users even show up for UAT, let alone actually click on anything.

This is why the vast majority of our testing happens in prod when our users are doing real work.

Sorry for the baby rant :)

Qualcomm’s stuff is within single-digit percentage points of the current-gen AMD and Intel chips both in power usage, performance, and battery life

Back in June, the new Snapdragon X processors were a lot more efficient than their x86 based counterparts. I can personally attest to much lower levels of heat generation.

The problem is that the current tradeoff is that huge amounts of the software you’ve been using just does not work, and a huge portion of it might NEVER work, because nobody is going to invest time in making it behave.

I agree with the sentiment, but IMO this is a PC and Windows problem. I would also extend this beyond pure comparability. I say this for a few reasons

• I lose about 5% charge/day with my laptop asleep. It does wake up very quickly, but 5%/day feels like a lot. At this point, I don’t think Microsoft has a strong incentive to really optimize the kernal for efficiency
• Historic massive variability in hardware across devices also makes it hard to optimize efficiency, although the current crop of snapdragon x laptops seem to have less variability
• One of the strengths of windows is that it can run applications written 20+ years ago fairly reliably. There’s a ton of software that’s still floating around that hasn’t been actively supported in years. I don’t see all of these software companies desiring to port their code over, especially without guarantees that the market will adopt ARM (the Apple approach) or until they see the ARM adoption rate go up (the current Windows approach)

All that said, I’ve had zero issues with emulation so far. I never personally used a M1 max when they launched, but from reports of that era the current Windows experience is at least as good as that.

I own a Lenovo Yoga slim 7x Gen 9, which is powered by a Snapdragon X. It certainly checks the “good enough” box. I use it primarily for photo culling/editing (I’m a holdout dedicated camera user). It is more than fit for purpose there, stays cool, is slim, and although I know the fan has come on a few times I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t on my lap. When I bought mine, it was also one of the better deals - you could upgrade to 32 GB of memory and a SSD for under $125 in total. The SSD also isn’t soldered, but the memory is. The 3k OLED display is amazing, but if you want the ultimate battery sipper it’s probably not the best choice. I still get tons of runtime per charge, but am somewhat sad that I lose about 5% charge per day thanks to the laptop not really being off while asleep.

The biggest downside is linxu support is very hit and miss depending on the laptop in question, which means you’re tied to windows 11. I don’t have the time to tinker with it, so I haven’t looked much further into it than this.

Teslas unlimited Internet package is also super cheap at $100/year the last time I checked. Competitors are multiple times more expensive.

SiriusXM does revenue share with auto companies.) Old article, but I’m too lazy to dig through a financial report or find something newer.

lol. Amusingly, my wife’s Dell Latitude 7400 with an i3 has much better stand by battery life than my 7x slim. The slim does wake up a ton faster - by the time the lid is open it’s already doing facial unlock and it it sees me it unlocks immediately and is “fully awake”, but I suspect this is achieved at the expense of more battery consumption while sleeping.

The 7x slim loses around 5% / day when asleep :(

Recall was the headline feature for Copilot+ PCs.

When a wave of ARM powered Windows laptops, and now a few desktops launched, they were all Copilot+ for whatever reason. They all marketed the NPU, but struggled to really say what the NPU unlocked that you couldn’t do with a CPU or GPU. Other marketing gimmicks were a better background blur and an AI drawing assistant in I think paint. I think you could also do “AI stuff” in photos, but don’t think that was local.

Honestly, I think everyone missed the punchline on ARM. The promise is lower heat and greater battery life. There was no need to bundle that with AI gimmicks. But clearly a PM thought so and now they’re trying to save face. Really taking advantage of ARM and pushing for battery life, by optimizing the kernal and changing what happens in standby, would probably be a bigger engineering lift.

/Thoughts from a rando who bought an ARM powered Windows laptop and generally likes it but has never touched the NPU enabled stuff

They did see it coming, this was the goal.

https://ingenext.ca/products/boost-50

50 hp for $1k

I can’t find them right now, but there are similar things you can buy to unlock factory features at a discount.

Up front disclaimer: this is all conjure on my part.

I own an “AI” laptop (only because I was interested in a snapdragon x). Most of the AI enabled features don’t really require a NPU, such as a decent background camera blur, some paint and photo stuff, live captions, etc. Microsoft was looking for a headline feature that didn’t already have a CPU/GPU/cloud implementation. Enter: recal.

IMO this is very much about finding a novel feature, that doesn’t have an alternate implementation. The near term motive is to justify their “AI” PCs to customers in hops that customers adopt them. I suspect the long term goal is opening up a revenue stream for AI - get customers used to “AI enabled” features and then tack a subscription cost onto them, but I truly hope this won’t be the case - especially when the hardware you own has a NPU.

I haven’t spent much time looking at Linux support due to having a busy personal life, so I’ll live with Win 11 in the meantime.

That said, I don’t think anyone has Linux booting on any Snapdragon X machines yet. I think there’s a signing limitation (eg device OEM signing) and a graphics driver gap. It does seem like the first will be overcome eventually, otherwise no one will be able to build their own machine.

More people in the market means more people working on both of these things!

I certainly won’t complain about cheaper, but I’m pretty happy with my Lenovo 7x Slim. It has a 14.5" 3k OLED display, so it’s not the battery life champ, but it’s built well and priced pretty well at $1,200 MSRP. You can upgrade the ram to 32 GB and the SSD to 1 TB for $110 combined. Typical Lenovo experience for shipping a custom build, but the laptop itself is great. Uninstall McAfee and away you go. I’ve only heard the fan kick on once, it doesn’t heat up in any meaningful way, the screen and keyboard are great, windows hello is surprisingly nice with facial recognition, etc etc. No comparability issues so far, but I also didn’t buy it to game on.

Growing the ARM share of the market will only make the experience better for everyone - for both windows and hopefully also for Linux.

That was absolutely the case until very recently. Qualcomm bought Nuvia, a start-up that was stacked with former Apple engineers, a few years ago. These processors are just now coming to market. Laptops with these processors are benchmarking around MacBook levels (slightly behind single core, slightly ahead in multi core).

It’s very hard to argue against Apple hardware and battery life. Maybe with windows moving slowly toward ARM they’ll catch up some. It’s going to be very tough though - Apple has full control over their hardware, which meat they can optimize their OS for it.

I really hope the snapdragon x laptops gain some traction. I recently went laptop shopping and what I wanted (good to great display, stays cold, good battery life) line up really well with a MacBook/MB air. I just couldn’t stomach the stupid mark-ups for memory and storage. I wound up with a Lenovo 7x slim. Upgrading to 32 GB memory and 1 TB storage was around $115. The non-emulated performance on windows is solid. Emulated is generally ok for my usage. I’m probably going to try Linux on it when I have a light week, but I’m somewhat wary of the impact that will have on battery life.

My electric chainsaws and weed whacker always start. Eventually our lawn tractor will kick the bucket and I’ll either convert it to electric or buy one.

Depending where you live, it can be really hard to find ethonal free gas. As an added bonus, carburators hate having ethonal sit in them. They’ll develop a varnish. Carbs also don’t like sitting partially dry and getting all the fuel out of them is a massive pain. Yay lawn equipment.

Both. Ethonal is still corrosive and the majority of fuel systems these days are compatible with E15. That said, check your owners manual.

Or random application availability and/or ease of use.

Two cases in point:

• Photo Mechanic. It makes it really easy/fast to sort through tons of photos. There are some Linux compatible alternatives, but they’re just not as good
• Fusion 360. There are a couple of things you can do to make it work, but since Linux isn’t officially supported the install process can be a bit fiddily and there’s no guarantee that an update won’t break things.

Things are certainly better now than they have been in the past, but if you’re somewhat time limited (eg your computer is more of a tool than a thing to spend time tweaking) Linux can still be a bit offputting - especially if some of the core applications you use aren’t officially supported.

It’s pretty annoying in 10 too. I had a big scratch folder on my desktop and one day it decided to start syncing with one drive after a restart and one of those setup/welcome like screens.