A difference with this wave of PC Arms? All the major PC manufacturers are indeed in the game

At Ars, we’ve been around long enough to tell the story of every time Microsoft tried to run Windows on Arm-based processors, instead of the x86 chips made by Intel and AMD that have been synonymous with Windows for over three years. decades. The most significant attempts came in 2012 with Windows RT, which looked like Windows 8 but could not run any Windows x86 applications; and in 2017, when Windows 10 Arm PCs arrived with rudimentary x86 emulation.

The primary PC maker supporting each of these Arm efforts was Microsoft itself, which launched the original Surface to introduce Windows RT and the first Surface Pro Arm of the Surface tablet while continuing to sell Intel versions. A few PC makers released Windows RT tablets, and most of them tried one or two Windows 10 to 11 Arm PCs. But there was never a big unified push that made it clear that the whole of the consumer PC ecosystem had joined Arm.

This week’s announcements were different: Yes, there was a new Surface Pro and a Surface Laptop from Microsoft leading the way (and the new Surface Pro is the first Surface Pro to offer Arm as the default option for most people). But the Surface launch was accompanied by a major wave of systems from virtually every major PC maker, suggesting at least some level of heightened enthusiasm for the Snapdragon X series that didn’t exist for older chips Arm.

At Lenovo, you get the Yoga Slim 7x and the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, variants of the company’s main consumer and business laptops. Dell is offering a version of its flagship XPS 13 laptop, as well as a pair of laptops in each of its Inspiron and Latitude families. HP has a consumer OmniBook and a professional EliteBook and has taken the opportunity to overhaul its entire laptop line. Acer has the Swift 14 AI; Asus offers the Vivobook S 15; Samsung has the Galaxy Book4 Edge.

For comparison, a total of four non-Surface devices launched with the first wave of Windows RT, and Samsung’s didn’t even launch in the US. In the spring of 2013, Acer’s CEO declared that Windows RT had “no value.” Qualcomm had a total of three launch partners for the first wave of Snapdragon 835 PCs that launched with Windows 10 in late 2017. Each of these companies launched a single laptop each (anyone who bought these systems would be doused four years later by Windows 11). list of supported processors, which did not support the 835).

It could be that all of these companies’ enthusiasm is actually driven by the “Copilot+ PC” label, which denotes a Windows PC with a neural processing unit (NPU) fast enough to power recall and reminder snapshots. other so-called “new generation” experiences. Everyone is trying to take advantage of the AI ​​boom, and at least for the next few months, these Arm-based Snapdragon PCs are the only ones that can get that label while Intel and AMD catch up. The advantage of linking the two is that Windows-on-Arm could evolve with Copilot+ if it succeeds; the risk is that consumer disinterest in Copilot+ Or Snapdragon chips could slow down both initiatives.

But whatever the reason, a big wave of hardware from all the PC OEMs is another thing that makes this particular Arm Windows push different from previous ones. The others, as we’ve written elsewhere, have better app compatibility, a greater selection of native apps, and chips that claim to be unambiguously better than what Intel and AMD make, although we’ll have to do more testing before knowing if the expected improvements in performance and battery life materialize in real life.

In the past, you kind of had to go out of your way to find and buy a Windows PC with an Arm chip, and you’d probably notice that it didn’t do the same things as a “normal PC.” The Arm announcements are a glimpse of what the future of Windows might look like: a broad mix of hardware using multiple chips and multiple instruction sets from multiple companies, but with all of it essentially hidden from most users by a familiar operating system and applications.