The ARM laptop game is heating up
2024-05-24
On the search for my next laptop with good performance, a slim and lightweight design as well as outstanding battery life (which is the biggest gripe I have with my current ThinkPad X390 Yoga), I naturally started looking at the current MacBook lineup due to its outstanding efficiency and thus runtime. But after 4 years of Apple dominanting the ARM laptop game with class-leading performance and runtime, Qualcomm + Microsoft are finally playing tag and apparently catching up...
My number one source of laptop reviews, news and just general information is Notebookcheck and has been for many years. When looking at their review of the current M3 MacBook Air , we find out that the ARM-based M3 chip inside outperforms basically anything in single-core performance, manages to keep up quite well in multi-core and especially is very power efficient, which is also the reason why this laptop with only a 52.6 Wh battery has basically the best battery life out of all tested devices - except for the HP Dragonfly G4 , but that also requires a massive 68 Wh unit to just slightly outperform the Air.
This example shows us that there definitely is a point to ARM laptops with their more than good-enough performance and huge benefits in power efficiency, which has a way more significant impact on perceived usability of a device than just a little more performance. I would take a laptop with a measurably better runtime over one with slightly or even meaningful better performance any day of the week and twice on Sunday - just like most the programmers I know and people I talk to. For normal office work and even some more niche activities like development or casual CAD design most laptops are plenty fast these days, so you don't really benefit from higher synthetic benchmark score - what you do benefit from in the real world however is better battery life. There just is a certain kind of disappointment to buying and using an expensive laptop, but having to worry about battery life and needing to carry a charge everywhere - which is the main reason for Apple's success in the laptop business lately IMHO, as they are the only one's excelling in this categorie.
Granted, when looking at The Best Business Notebooks compilation from Notebookcheck, you can also find some quite long-lasting laptops with traditional x86 processors - besides the already mentioned HP Dragonfly G4 primarily the HP EliteBook 845 G10 and the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 . But despite their slightly larger batteries they can't even come close to the MacBook Air's runtime under light use (video playback) and lack significantly behind under heavy loads, which shows that there just is an engineering barrier keeping x86 from leading in this area. That's why I'm super excited that Qualcomm released their ARM-based X Elite chip for laptops and the first devices powered by it are finally being hitting the market .
Unlike prior attempts from Microsoft with basically enhanced smartphone chips developed together with Qualcomm, the X Elite is a real competition for Apple's M3, which finally creates some competition in this sector. According to first tests the X Elite even outperforms the base M3 in multi-core scenarios, which IMHO put Apple under so much tension that they released their new iPad Pro with M4 processor a little earlier to keep the performance crown in the ARM sector. The M4 seems to measurably beat the X Elite in basically every way, but the ARM laptop game is certainly heating up, which is a good thing in my mind. Competition always boosts development and generally benefits the consumer by leading to better products than those released in a vacuum. I'm really interested in how this will develop...
One thing we completely ignored so far however is software support and this one will arguably decide whether or not ArightRM is the future of mainstream computing. When Apple released their M1 back in 2020, they provided the Rosetta 2 emulation layer to run older x86-only apps, but encouraged (some might even say forced) developers to update their apps due to the closed nature of their platforms with tight control over what is allowed and what isn't - this basically means that most developers didn't have an alternative to porting their apps over, if they don't want to miss out on all Mac users. With the X Elite this is a different picture, since it runs Windows on ARM, which coexists with the regular x86 Windows and only makes up a tiny percentage of all installations right now. This means that developers have little incentive to spend the time porting their apps, which then might keep away the wast majority of users from switching to WoA due to lacking application support. Microsoft has also developed an emulation layer for x86 apps, but it remains to be seen how well it really performs and how good application support with the notoriously complicated legacy-features of Windows is.
Sadly for me, I'm looking for a new laptop with excellent battery life and good performance that just works right now and the X Elite only supports WoA for the foreseeable future, which is a no-go for me. I need a Unix-based operating system to get my stuff done and feel at home, so only Linux and MacOS are really an option. Qualcomm announced that they are working on Linux support and have already upstreamed some of the necessary changes to the Linux kernel, but from my experience with new devices on Linux this takes at least two or three years until it is stable and everything at least somewhat works, which is too much waiting for me. Furthermore, battery runtime of x86 laptop has always been worse on Linux by 25 to 50 % for me due to missing optimizations and this trend will likely continue with the X Elite, so my best bet for a long-endurance programming laptop currently seems to be a MacBook. MacOS isn't great, but at least it's Unix-based, somewhat trustworthy as well as highly customizable and Apple has proven to provide excellent battery life with their laptops over the last few years. The prices (especially for upgrades) are outrageous, but most business laptops I have been looking at aren't much cheaper and for someone who uses their devices as extensively as me almost any price is a good investment.
With that said, I hope you found this article interesting and got a bit of insight into the current ARM laptop developments as well as my personal struggles with choosing a new device. If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in the comments down below and have a lovely day...