Who has had/has a new Surface with ARM and a MacBook M1+ series

Trig said:
Was there not a thing about how an Apple Silicon Macbook could run emulate Windows faster than the original ARM Surface Pro's, hows that looking now?
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Can believe that; the previous ARM processors were calculators compared to the M chips. The new one is in a different league it seems.
 
Be nice, I'm just chucking spanners at the mo, but I really do like the Surface stuff, and I like new shiny toys, I'm just trying to convince myself I don't need one lol
 
Mesai said:
Apple forced developers to build for ARM which will trickle down to Windows.
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And as already said - easy to do when you control your entire ecosystem, from hardware through to how apps are published, and how the media perceive your product through controlled benchmarks

Equally when the majority of Apple apps are from big name companies, Apple can literally contact them/throw money at them to make a new version of their app that then not only runs on Apple silicon but fully takes advantage of all the hardware acceleration available, to show positively in controlled benchmarks.

Microsoft haven't got that level of control, and certainly not that level of competency. Their answer no doubt will be to require Windows Store apps to have both x86 and Arm versions, missing the point that Windows Stores apps are terrible metro derived things that no one really wants, and excluding the abundance of software out there that isn't and never will be part of the Windows Store.
 
Armageus said:
And as already said - easy to do when you control your entire ecosystem, from hardware through to how apps are published, and how the media perceive your product through controlled benchmarks

Equally when the majority of Apple apps are from big name companies, Apple can literally contact them/throw money at them to make a new version of their app that then not only runs on Apple silicon but fully takes advantage of all the hardware acceleration available, to show positively in controlled benchmarks.

Microsoft haven't got that level of control, and certainly not that level of competency. Their answer no doubt will be to require Windows Store apps to have both x86 and Arm versions, missing the point that Windows Stores apps are terrible metro derived things that no one really wants, and excluding the abundance of software out their that isn't and never will be part of the Windows Store.
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Microsoft are throwing money at some of the main companies to get them onboard, and with only 1 player in the hardware game, they're only need to optimise for the Snapdragon, similar to the Apple situation.

ARM isn't new for a lot of the major companies so it's far less work than what they had to do for Apple.

MS already have control over things like Office and VS; most developer tools already work on ARM, now you just need the creative tools onboard and you have a significant audience. These are open areas where Apple still struggles (less on the developer tools side).

If it all works out, which is a big if given how MS run things, the only reason you'd get a MacBook is if you use software that's only available on their platform.
 
Received my Surface Pro 11 with the OLED screen and X Elite CPU yesterday; set it up and then cloned the drive to a new 2TB SSD.
Loving this so far, admittedly I've been using Surface Pro X / Surface Pro 9 ARM machines for a few years now but this thing is in a totally different league; super quick and responsive.
 
Initia reports seem promising eh?

I'm seeing widely different reports with benchmarks and that may be because there are different chips.

And lets face it, its all down to your experience of it.

Some posts on X show people using certain x86 apps and getting wild crashes.

So its been a few days, how are you all getting on with you work flows?
 
Had ten of the Surface devices delivered, and I'm yet to get one out of the box due to other issues elsewhere. Will get some hands on time this week coming hopefully, might test some games as per the OP's request not sure what will run on them though.
 
I've been using mine as an iPad replacement, and so far it's been ace. Great battery life, standby works, and no incompatibilities beyond the native NordVPN client not working. The benchmarks are interesting - the power management seems to have a decent impact on the benchmark results.
 
mattpj said:
I’ve got a MacBook Pro m3 pro. Which is speedy and has great battery life.

I’m no big fan of macOS and prefer windows 11 for compatibility - and the fact so much of what I do is windows based.

Every other laptop I’ve tried has one of the following issues:

It gets red hot
Its noisy
The battery life is poor

Admittedly, I don’t have an exhaustive experience of the very latest major laptops, however surely there is something like the MacBook Pro on the windows side?

I’ve seen the new ARM based windows laptops and surface.

I wanted to know how they compared with the power and efficiency of Apple Silicon?

Ultimately, I’d prefer a windows laptop but don’t want the power or battery trade off.
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I have the SL7 X Plus variant and M1 and M2 airs.

The SL7 is fantastic. Super snappy, emulation is great, runs nice and cool, yet to hear the fans. Battery is decent, not as good as the airs but still very good. Getting 12 hours easily out of it with heavy office work, including using emulated apps such as discord and adobe and screen brightness at 70%ish. 120Hz is a nice have. I’m sure the battery will improve even more with less emulation and drive updates in time. Or turn off 120hz and get more battery.

I find the emulation on SL7 is better than Rosetta on M1. Apps feel more smooth.

It did get a bit warm for the first few hours with updating and indexing etc, but after that its been a joy to use.

Geekbench: In recommend mode (most power efficient) on battery getting 2228 ST and MT 12157, doesn't even heat up doing the test. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6681782

Haptic trackpad is great too, league ahead of anything I have used on Windows laptops.
 
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A large law firm I work for is now evaluating these - they don't scrimp on the kit they provide. A big frustration constantly received about the laptops they hand out is battery life. Interesting they're assessing the lenovo SD devices as a complete replacement as well as a SP as an additional device.

I'll watch that with interest - they've a decent Tech budget so don't mess about!
 
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