@@Just-a-human-being-d2tof course, it's all a question of your performance needs and whether you'd rather experiment with ARM. I'm fact I'd recommend x64 machines like Intel or AMD unless you REALLY want to tinker with Windows in ARM explicitly or have very light computing needs (like mostly just using web browsers for example).
I think some of macbook advantages are from integrated design, which Microsoft and especially its partners have trouble replicating. For example, I bet that even the displays on macbooks have higher-than-average-efficiency LEDs. You can do that when your product line is limited so you have very high LCD volumes. The MacBooks skimp on memory and that saves A LOT of power. But as a result, they go to extreme lengths to un-do the RAM shortages and provide enough memory (like virtual memory and in-memory compressed virtual memory) to try to un-do the losses from skimping on RAM. Most importantly, Macs just don't have power profiles. They are efficient ALL the time, not when you shift gears into low-power mode, and that REALLY MATTERS A LOT. Overall, it seems the ex-server chips from Nuvia that Qualcomm is using for its snapdragon products are not nearly as power-efficient as Mac in-house-designed M1-M4 chips, probably 10-15% less efficient. So the snapdragons are 10-15% more efficient than x86, but 10-15% less efficient than ARM. And the snapdragons have EXCELLENT low-power video decoding so video playback is almost 3x longer than x86 machines.
@@systemBuilder Skimping on memory definitely does NOT save power as it has to compensate by constantly compressing data and swapping to and from SSD. All of that obviously consumes more so it wastes power if anything.
@@yurymleh you really don't have a clue do you? They run virtual memory and it only gets used when you switch between applications, or if both applications happen to be writing to the screen at the same time, which is rare. This is power draw only once every several minutes. The overhead of compression or flash-based paging systems pales in comparison to the constant power draw and DRAM refresh current needed for a second bank of RAM!
@@systemBuilder If that were true MBA with 16 and 24GB would have worse battery life times than MBA with 8GB which they don't. So who is clueless again?
This is the most in depth overview of the Snapdragon laptops I've seen since launch. Thank you for this! As an architect, I am a little more confident with these devices but usability would be better if these mature more next year.
I would guess this is mostly about adapting software for this processor type. Overall, I do think snapdragon laptops are probably best for most people. After all, it gives lower temps and longer battery life. Most people just need their laptop for editing documents, or using some web app or relatively lightweight business related app. I do hope they actually bring out low cost pc's exactly for this case. It would transform laptops businesses could use and you can recommend to relatives and friends that just need basic laptop. Pretty sure these are going to become mainstream laptop processors, and we are just waiting for software to catch up.
It looks like Jim Keller really knows how to save power. 6:01 - this scatter plot shows 4 types of processors. The yellow and blue ones did NOT have Jim Keller leading the design teams. The red and black ones DID have Jim Keller working to lead some iterations of the design teams! See the difference! I thought you would !!!!
Josh has been testing these laptops for 10 days. I knew that the next video would give a total review about the laptops. Turned out it isn't as great as it seemed. I'll be waiting for the Intel Lunar Lake chips. Thanks Josh, you are my fav laptop and now also business channel. I only trust your advise.
Hi. Can you tell why is so many people waiting for Lunar lake? Are they gonna make some very significant jump? I am gonna purchase a meteor lake laptop soon (confused between Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i or Ideapad pro 5), but people waiting for Lunar lake are making me nervous.
@@narutokunn uses a more advanced node from TSMC, on-package memory, low power design, next gen integrated graphics (around rtx 3050 in benchmarks). Multi threaded performance won't be anything special tho.
I am using Surface Laptop 7 with X Elite 80-100, man I have to say its very great, I get more battery life than my Macbook Pro M1 und extremely great performance.
People miss the point of these laptops, the majority of buyers are looking for an office suite, basics machine, that is fast, reliable and has great battery life. Your typical mom and pop or corporate giving a powerpoint presentation to off-site clients isn't going to be using Matlab. They wan't a Windows platform machine with tablet-like battery and portability in a traditional form factor. For that, the Snapdragon machines seem like a fantastic option if you have to buy now.
That's an amazing video, you're clearly the best content creator in the laptop space. It's really useful to know which softwares work and don't work, however it would have been nice if you would have specified if they work natively or through emulation.
It’s so nice to see reviews that don’t just go into what a content creator uses. I’d imagine far more workers are using virtual desktop interfaces to access applications than use video editing software
@@64bitmodels66 There are many major companies running most of their applications on some sort of a VDI, especially in heavily regulated industries. In my previous company alone there are more people using a VDI than professional video editors in the USA according to the BLS. Not having something like Citrix running smoothly can be a massive deal breaker when purchasing a laptop.
I appreciate your honesty Josh I just recently found your channel and you showed me that it's not worth buying these laptops now so I'll wait until the end of the year to see if the situation gets better.
Great review as always, though the title and thumbnail are very misleading... for example, something like the Humane AI pin is useless now, whatever updates they give, it will still not match a smartphone with ChatGPT 4o or Gemini or the latest Siri. But most of the issues in SDX devices can and will be fixed in a few months. And the video could have mentioned that, i guess it was not in Josh's intention to support Windows on ARM. so I feel the title and thumbnail are misleading.
Im so glad im watching this video before i do one of those moments where i buy something and somehow theres a video that says why the product in question isnt effective.
Office work tasks are "professional" tasks. Perhaps what you were looking for was media creation tasks, which are important and professional, but not inherently more so than somebody who lives in desktop publishing suites or project management software.
You're correct. I didn't even realized that. I think he wanted/meant that office work tasks are low to medium in "heavyness" or "demandingness". As in, as a benchmark, they're not overly useful for determining how powerful a CPU is. Hence the need to put them in a separate category.
There are so many professions and "professional" tasks - given what you know now, how do you differentiate the varieties? Josh's approach is valid to me and not quite misleading as he explains the typical office work apps.
Just feels like a chromebook as of now. Maybe that will change when more apps become avail, but can't see any reason to buy this when thin and light laptops already exist with good battery life.
@JustJoshTech I came from the comment you made on Linus Tech Tips video. Your video about these new laptops is much better as it seems you are actually applying real world use cases and with more comparisons.
Lets not forget we have cloud windows desktops too. You could buy a macbook or Surfacebook and run your apps on a traditional windows 365 machine. Game by streaming it from more capable hardware, etc. For me, heat and fan noise drive me crazy. I'm probably going to try the Surfacebook, they have a 60 day return window. This fair and balanced take earned a subscription to your channel!
oh gosh after many hours searching for pros and cons in depth, finally you mentioned everything including what us, graphic artists want to know ! Thank you !
I think this is one of the best channels out there. Not just stupid low-effort ad-like videos about new products, but it offers actual analysis from multiple perspectives.
I bought the latest Surface Pro with Elite. I agree, and I like it, but only I know what I want to do on the surface. For other programs, I just go back to AMD/intel.
@@EibrahamCx It really has nothing to do with 4 years of optimization. The experience was already extremely polished when the first M1 laptops hit the market. For instance, all the applications Josh identified as incompatible with Snapdragon, like the audio software, worked perfectly on M1, even though many of them did not have native ARM versions at the time.
@@boshi9 exactly; Apple was way more hush-hush about the M series prior to them hitting shelves, and yet everything was so much more polished on release Most of the issues listed in this video are only from the maker's preliminary testing. That's disturbing. There must be many more teething issues he hasn't even come across yet on those machines The release feels under-baked and rushed to get to market before Apple's M4 and AMD Strix Point release
It is amazing how long it takes for qualcom to compete with apple M series chip. They are already at M4 while qualcomm chip still catching up to the M3 in overall performance
I already expected some caveats coming with being their first release/1st gen from a mile away. Though considering their GPU performance on their mobile phones, i was surprised to see their gaming performance is not that good lmao.
@wandering-jew go watch a video about arm gpus. These people can explain it better than me, but basically, the circuits around the CPU are very smushed together in a complex way for better performance.
@@luigidabro thats bs. arm is just a cpu architecture, it has nothing to do with where the graphics card is located or how it is connected. putting an integrated graphics cards into them is a choice independent of them being arm cpus.
I appreciated the video, it covers a lot of based, including performance when plugged in, and a host of software interactions. Thank you for lowering my hype for these ones, I though I was missing out but that is very questionable now considering my usecase.
Great review. I enjoy using my ARM based ThinkPad X13s for web development. No issues, I get insane battery life, and the Qualcomm 5G WWAN chip is fantastic, so I can code literally anywhere.
Thank you Josh, absolutely loved the video and have always respected you deeply for all the high-level content. You clearly come from the best technical and engineering perspective when you share your content. It's the stuff I really need to know. Keep on doing what you're doing-thumbs up!
EXCEPTIONAL REVIEW 👌🏾 - I think the enthusiastic M3 comparisons mislead many into thinking these are Macbook Pro competitors geared for creatives and power users. They are clearly not, and it's a marketing misstep.
Aren't these also being compared to the current/last gen Intel and AMD CPUs? We should get the next gen ones soon. The X Elite should be compared to those
It also seems like they're dipping their toes in ARM bit don't want to take a foot out of x86. They're gonna walk down the middle of the road until they are squished like a grape and forced to make a choice and lean hard into it.
Yeah, it's good for casual user But like, there is no clear slice of cake for it If I am casual user, Says, I don't have any specific software, I want battery life, and I want to use ARM. I can always use Apple Macbook. Sure, it's not Windows, but software support is much better at this point. If I play games or have any specific software, x86 is always the choice. Windows on Arm is the 3rd branch after x86 and Apple, any software support or official release will be behind. It really is overhyped, there is no real reason to use it now or soon. Unless things changed in next 10 years, but Intel/AMD is not gonna watch and do nothing.
Thump up for honest review. For casual users, X-Elite is more like compete against Macbook. Mackbook has clear advantages, more mature platform, less software compatibility issues, better performance/efficiency, even battery life. The only downside for Macbook is more expensive, especially for 16GB version, but Macbook will have much better resale values after a few years. For professional and game users, compatibility is the top priority. Ecosystem takes years even decade to build up. Probably it need another 2-3 iterations for ARM+Windows platform to get enough market shares attracting software developers. Regardless, competition is always good to consumers. Now ARM+Winodws gives AMD/Intel serious pressure to release power efficiency and good performance laptop chips. The up coming Intel Lunar Lake seems to be quite interesting/exciting one.
Wow, this is the FIRST review I have seen over the last couple of days which truthfully highlights the issues with this processor and doesn't just sugarcoat everything by singing it's praises.👏
Your experience with the Samsung Book4 Edge is strange. I wonder if your first one was simply a dud. There's always a percentage of a product that slip through QA and fail, sadly. It's also interesting to me that you've heard fan noise on yours. If it was the 16, I can't comment (though I realize it's a higher binned processor capable of higher clocks than the 14 inch) but on the 14 I've yet to hear the fans come on. Also, one very important benefit: sleep actually works properly. I can close the lid and not worry about it waking itself and turning it on the next morning will only see it loose 2-5% battery.
After seeing your videos as well as some actual QUALITY reviews that arent just influencer ads, I am definitely SKIPPING Snapdragon/Windows on Arm laptops. I can buy an OLED Intel Core Ultra 185H laptop for $800 which is 90% as good with zero issues. OR I can just wait a couple months for next gen Intel Lunar Lake and Zen 5 which are expected to be better than Snapdragon. In no world does buying a $1300 Snapdragon laptop with all its software issues make sense.
That’s just silly. This is so far ahead of the that in all facets. We now have more native applications, better emulation, and capable hardware for cpu tasks.
Exactly, my point I've overstated. It's not bad the X Elite chip. it's just overhyped. Also, its dubious that Qualcomm is doing major sponsorship and the tech outlets are being bought. Qualcomm X Elite chip is no match to Apples M series. It's in a different league. Have you heard of CUDA? Nvidia's monopoly on Windows, that is the majority framework for graphics acceleration? Unlike Windows, all Apple hardware is accelerated by Metal, every Macbook or Mac has the best performance per chip per graphic acceleration. There's also media decoders and accelerators on the M series, that make content creation and media a breeze. The X Elite lacks that. Weak GPU hardware, weak graphic acceleration, no media decoders and accelerators. In a price point that is too expensive, 1300 to 2000us. Without considering the arm compability issue. While some Qualcomm advocates will state, it will get better. Consider the price entry! It's not acceptable, users who was bought into the hype, will be in a grey spot without fixing until who knows when or until developers decide IF they port their software to arm. The price point should have been a chromebook competitor, topping 650/800 us. But why did they go for such a steep price on these chips? Of course Qualcomm compared itself against Apple, to charge an exuberant price. Cpu performance doesn't equal Apple. There's too many variables extras, gpu, software compability, engines and accelerators, framework, even MacOs has a premium price over Windows. I hope Qualcomm restructures pricing with OEMs, cause right now the problem is the price point. Else get a real macbook air, and if you need Windows machine go with Intel or AMD next gen. Note you can run Windows Arm on Apple M series with parallels. The performance is great and you get both of the two worlds, Mac and Windows.
If the battery capacity of both the Macbook Pro 14 M3 and the ASUS Vivobook S15 is the same at 70Wh, and they last roughly the same amount of time on battery, why is it that the Macbook has such an edge in power efficiency? I’m not very knowledgeable on these matters.
7:35 & 11:35 *_This is the moment of revelation,_* *Snapdragon X ELITE's are more of INTEL than they are APPLE* 🍎, until they figure out how to beat APPLE 🍎 in this, they are NO better than an incremental improvement on INTEL, which is more like a continuity than a disruptive change.
This is a fantastic write up review that actually give a lot of insights and info for these new laptops. I really wish qualcomm was more direct with their models instead of having same name with less performance based on model seems misleading
Picked up the Surface 7 15" earlier this week. I really like it for basic tasks and battery has been great. That Sensel touchpad alone is worth the price of the admission, it's like a breath of fresh air coming from the 16" GB4P horrendous touchpad.... Still waiting to see the verdict on the Zenbook S16 in a few weeks though.
That scatter plot is beautiful! More reviews should have these! It clearly showed that efficiency can vary with overall power consumption, thus a simple performance/power ratio is not sufficient to describe how efficient a processor is. Kind of weird/amazing that apple chip gets more efficient at higher power. Also snapdragon's efficiency at best is the same level with AMD is kind of... disappointing, which also prove that the gap between apple and x86 is probably not ISA but chip design and manufacturing node. (Curious if AMD can be at same level with Apple if on the same node.)
I like it too as it's well done. A small thing is that I would have preferred power measurement using an external mains powered display rather than the minus 7W adjusting method.
I don't see where we have been misled. Most of the issues were known before the launch. And we all know that the platform will stand or fall with software support. If it picks up, and we get future generations than this would be a nice step forward.
I am referring to the level of hype bestowed on these. Many people are saying that these are bringing Apple level's of efficiency to Windows. That is simply not true. Hope that helps
I think you should have tested in the different power modes in windows. Because, the slim 7x in power saving mode would have phenomenally different performance per watt. These chips run more efficiently at 23 watts anyway.
It's a big question which power settings were used for these tests. Particularly considering that these settings are in several different places, interact in weird ways, and are called differently by different vendors
X Elite chips are built to be energy savers and to run AI models right there on your device. Yeah, NVIDIA GPUs have more TOPs, but they’re not gonna last on a laptop that needs to save power and keep going all day. The thing is, these chips have an NPU that’s super energy-efficient. It can keep multiple AI models running for hours on end, all on battery power. I’ve got a Razer laptop with an NVIDIA RTX GPU, and let me tell you, it can’t run ML models on battery for more than a few hours!
Thank you for the honest and very informative review and especially your advice .. Your channel has become my main source for mobile tech reviews. I stopped watching and trusting many popular tech channels especially Linus Tech Tips & Dave2D. I don't believe they are being totally truthful nor do they seem to have their viewers best interest at heart. They seem to be nothing more than an extention of a company's marketing departtment vs being independent reviewers. I won't purchase any laptop without first checking out Josh's reviews & recommendations. I'm holding off making any laptop purchases until I see what AMD brings too the laptop market over the next few months. It is exciting to see the competition starting to heat up. Thank you again!
When I was there only 10-15% of Googlers had intel (debian) laptops. Android devs did their compiles on 28 or 32 core linux workstations, and probably downloaded from their workstations, maybe sometimes in android studio on their macs. So Google may not be super motivated to release android studio for windows since nobody at Google had a Windows machine!
Stop comparing them to a early 2000 PC WITH NO TOUCHSCREEN or pen support. WHO THE HELL BUYS A LAPTOP THESE DAYS WITH NO TOUCHSCREEN? My issue is Windows, not an operating system for servious work. It's crapware & vaporware. The problem isn't the hardware. IT'S THE SOFTWARE. I'VE BEEN RESETTING MY PC FOR OVER AN HOUR TO GET THAT NONFUNCTIONAL CRAPWARE OFF IT.
The potential is there but I had no faith in Microsoft to have everything compatible at launch with these laptops. It’s gonna take years for these things to have full compatibility
This is the best review that I have been looking for years. I still have surface studio laptop x86, but my daily laptop is Surface Pro X SQ2, I only stick with surface pro for the time being and i possibly go back to MacBook Air.
it would be nice to test battery life on battery saving mode don't need the full power of the soc to watch youtube or use microsoft office and similar tools at a cafe
Great review. More grounded and realistic than others I had seen before. I suppose it's too early to consider one of those. I hope AMD and Intel can put out competitive processors so we can have long battery life and good performance on our laptops.
Linux should work with the next major kernel release if I recall correctly. I mean Qualcomm themselves have been submitting patches and drivers upstream. And I’d never buy a Windows 11 device. They’re basically advertisement platforms at this point.
FYI this set of benchmarks is already invalid because the lenovo amd lapotp uses a specialized low performance chip from amd designed solely for lenovo. The 7840s is probably the "worst case scenario" for amd.
I'm eager for a transition in laptops but I can wait. What I'd really like is a minipc that I can run Linux on. So I'm in the "wait" camp for all of this. I have no interest in gaming on a laptop (I have a desktop for that) but I would definitely like a good software development platform that's fast and has a long battery life. I don't have much use for MacOS unless for some reason we decided to start using it at work so I have no interest in those machines. I was hoping for a little stronger launch for the Snapdragon X machines but I can/will wait.
Any gpu powered pro x86 apps will work ridiculously slow compared to a laptop with a dgpu, at similar price, the second is a must choice, try to do a render from blender, probably 20 times faster on a nvidia gpu with optix, instead of a cpu render on the snapdragon (that have a non compatible gpu)
Hi Josh! I love your videos and am a huge fan of your presentation method. Can you review the new HP Pavilion Plus (2024) 16-ab1000na Laptop - Core Ultra with RTX 4050!
What's always missing from rhe equation is Microsoft is ruining the experience because developers will need years of work to port software from x86 architecture to proper ARM... Not just ARM, 64-bit ARM. Potential rewrite of major software. How long will that take? As in software such as Ableton, you may get lucky because one company changing and recompiling an entire suite of software, but what about the individual commercial plug-ins? The x86 translation is no option
🛒 Recommended Surface Laptop 7: bestbuy.7tiv.net/oq1GBb
👉 Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x: bestbuy.7tiv.net/R57rVg
🎉 All Our Favorite Laptops: www.justjosh.tech/
Can i buy Ultra 9 185H processor laptop instead of Snapdragon X?
I'd love to help you make a comparison of more of these awesome Snapdragon PCs.
@@Just-a-human-being-d2tof course, it's all a question of your performance needs and whether you'd rather experiment with ARM.
I'm fact I'd recommend x64 machines like Intel or AMD unless you REALLY want to tinker with Windows in ARM explicitly or have very light computing needs (like mostly just using web browsers for example).
Surface Laptop 7 is so good
X86 is better
Amazing to finally have a reviewer with consistent focus on software development workloads across multiple devices.
Also Alex Ziskind
I think some of macbook advantages are from integrated design, which Microsoft and especially its partners have trouble replicating. For example, I bet that even the displays on macbooks have higher-than-average-efficiency LEDs. You can do that when your product line is limited so you have very high LCD volumes. The MacBooks skimp on memory and that saves A LOT of power. But as a result, they go to extreme lengths to un-do the RAM shortages and provide enough memory (like virtual memory and in-memory compressed virtual memory) to try to un-do the losses from skimping on RAM. Most importantly, Macs just don't have power profiles. They are efficient ALL the time, not when you shift gears into low-power mode, and that REALLY MATTERS A LOT. Overall, it seems the ex-server chips from Nuvia that Qualcomm is using for its snapdragon products are not nearly as power-efficient as Mac in-house-designed M1-M4 chips, probably 10-15% less efficient. So the snapdragons are 10-15% more efficient than x86, but 10-15% less efficient than ARM. And the snapdragons have EXCELLENT low-power video decoding so video playback is almost 3x longer than x86 machines.
@@systemBuilder Skimping on memory definitely does NOT save power as it has to compensate by constantly compressing data and swapping to and from SSD. All of that obviously consumes more so it wastes power if anything.
@@yurymleh you really don't have a clue do you? They run virtual memory and it only gets used when you switch between applications, or if both applications happen to be writing to the screen at the same time, which is rare. This is power draw only once every several minutes. The overhead of compression or flash-based paging systems pales in comparison to the constant power draw and DRAM refresh current needed for a second bank of RAM!
@@systemBuilder If that were true MBA with 16 and 24GB would have worse battery life times than MBA with 8GB which they don't. So who is clueless again?
This is the most in depth overview of the Snapdragon laptops I've seen since launch. Thank you for this! As an architect, I am a little more confident with these devices but usability would be better if these mature more next year.
Always buy 2nd generation of anything. I've decided to wait for Surface Pro 12 with X Elite 2.
If lunar lake delivers I think you should stay on x86 why put on Jeopardy your work?
@@jorge86rodriguez I already have my PC for that, I just need a laptop that has good battery life haha
100 years later lol
I would guess this is mostly about adapting software for this processor type. Overall, I do think snapdragon laptops are probably best for most people. After all, it gives lower temps and longer battery life. Most people just need their laptop for editing documents, or using some web app or relatively lightweight business related app. I do hope they actually bring out low cost pc's exactly for this case. It would transform laptops businesses could use and you can recommend to relatives and friends that just need basic laptop.
Pretty sure these are going to become mainstream laptop processors, and we are just waiting for software to catch up.
The scatter-plot at 6:02 is epic. A real eye-opener!
It looks like Jim Keller really knows how to save power. 6:01 - this scatter plot shows 4 types of processors. The yellow and blue ones did NOT have Jim Keller leading the design teams. The red and black ones DID have Jim Keller working to lead some iterations of the design teams! See the difference! I thought you would !!!!
Josh has been testing these laptops for 10 days. I knew that the next video would give a total review about the laptops. Turned out it isn't as great as it seemed. I'll be waiting for the Intel Lunar Lake chips.
Thanks Josh, you are my fav laptop and now also business channel. I only trust your advise.
yup, Lunar Lake it will be for me as well :).
Hi. Can you tell why is so many people waiting for Lunar lake? Are they gonna make some very significant jump? I am gonna purchase a meteor lake laptop soon (confused between Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i or Ideapad pro 5), but people waiting for Lunar lake are making me nervous.
Idk about the performance uplifts but wait for a while if u can@@narutokunn
@@narutokunn I would wait for Lunar Lake. I believe it's faster, and most important more energy efficient
@@narutokunn uses a more advanced node from TSMC, on-package memory, low power design, next gen integrated graphics (around rtx 3050 in benchmarks). Multi threaded performance won't be anything special tho.
Thank you Josh and team! Your honesty and straight forwardness is highly appreciated
The only channel that covered linux support! 🎉🎉 Thanks.
I am using Surface Laptop 7 with X Elite 80-100, man I have to say its very great, I get more battery life than my Macbook Pro M1 und extremely great performance.
Hopefully these arm chips age like fine wine from compatibility aspect because , competition always good thing for consumer
People miss the point of these laptops, the majority of buyers are looking for an office suite, basics machine, that is fast, reliable and has great battery life. Your typical mom and pop or corporate giving a powerpoint presentation to off-site clients isn't going to be using Matlab. They wan't a Windows platform machine with tablet-like battery and portability in a traditional form factor. For that, the Snapdragon machines seem like a fantastic option if you have to buy now.
We are definitely aware of this and agree with you
That's an amazing video, you're clearly the best content creator in the laptop space. It's really useful to know which softwares work and don't work, however it would have been nice if you would have specified if they work natively or through emulation.
Finally a proper indepth review. Most reviewers would just show some synthetic benchmarks and some Photoshop and figma benchmarks and call it a day.
It’s so nice to see reviews that don’t just go into what a content creator uses. I’d imagine far more workers are using virtual desktop interfaces to access applications than use video editing software
@@whenhen Right? I use android studio, pytorch, and mathlab. All that on a linux distro (Arch). 99% of all reviews never cover these.
@@whenhen also Im learning ethical hacking using kali linux. Would have been a total waste when it comes to this laptop.
@@whenhentf is that last sentence? Video editing software is widely used
@@64bitmodels66 There are many major companies running most of their applications on some sort of a VDI, especially in heavily regulated industries. In my previous company alone there are more people using a VDI than professional video editors in the USA according to the BLS. Not having something like Citrix running smoothly can be a massive deal breaker when purchasing a laptop.
I appreciate your honesty Josh I just recently found your channel and you showed me that it's not worth buying these laptops now so I'll wait until the end of the year to see if the situation gets better.
Great review as always, though the title and thumbnail are very misleading...
for example, something like the Humane AI pin is useless now, whatever updates they give, it will still not match a smartphone with ChatGPT 4o or Gemini or the latest Siri.
But most of the issues in SDX devices can and will be fixed in a few months. And the video could have mentioned that, i guess it was not in Josh's intention to support Windows on ARM. so I feel the title and thumbnail are misleading.
Im so glad im watching this video before i do one of those moments where i buy something and somehow theres a video that says why the product in question isnt effective.
Office work tasks are "professional" tasks. Perhaps what you were looking for was media creation tasks, which are important and professional, but not inherently more so than somebody who lives in desktop publishing suites or project management software.
Exactly what I thought!
I agree 100 per percent and is a serious blind spot in many reviews
You're correct. I didn't even realized that. I think he wanted/meant that office work tasks are low to medium in "heavyness" or "demandingness". As in, as a benchmark, they're not overly useful for determining how powerful a CPU is. Hence the need to put them in a separate category.
There are so many professions and "professional" tasks - given what you know now, how do you differentiate the varieties? Josh's approach is valid to me and not quite misleading as he explains the typical office work apps.
@@xiangli2452 I can guarantee that every company uses Office, and just a very small % of professionals are making videos.
THANK YOU SO MUCH for testing linux on these machines, you're the first ones to even mention it for these machines as far as I'm aware
Just feels like a chromebook as of now. Maybe that will change when more apps become avail, but can't see any reason to buy this when thin and light laptops already exist with good battery life.
This is really outstanding. Really appreciate the effort on Linux too!
Great review as always. For windows power mode, did you run it at balanced, high performance, or best efficiency?
Fantastic review. I wish everyone else on YT did work like this.
@JustJoshTech I came from the comment you made on Linus Tech Tips video. Your video about these new laptops is much better as it seems you are actually applying real world use cases and with more comparisons.
Great review and detailed from a user experience. This is different from other reviews that i have seen of this product. Much better! Thanks!
First generation X Elite still need more Windows ARM improvement and more software polishment but MS will get there running Windows ARM
Lets not forget we have cloud windows desktops too. You could buy a macbook or Surfacebook and run your apps on a traditional windows 365 machine. Game by streaming it from more capable hardware, etc. For me, heat and fan noise drive me crazy. I'm probably going to try the Surfacebook, they have a 60 day return window. This fair and balanced take earned a subscription to your channel!
This is the video I was waiting for. Thank you. Very nice research.
I appreciate that
oh gosh after many hours searching for pros and cons in depth, finally you mentioned everything including what us, graphic artists want to know ! Thank you !
I've been waiting for your take on the Copilot + laptops before I consider any of them... Thanks Josh!
I think this is one of the best channels out there. Not just stupid low-effort ad-like videos about new products, but it offers actual analysis from multiple perspectives.
I bought the latest Surface Pro with Elite. I agree, and I like it, but only I know what I want to do on the surface. For other programs, I just go back to AMD/intel.
Josh you are on top of it! thanks for a great review of this new tech
The problem here is windows
MacOS i well integrated to the M series its not even close
Probably because macOS has been optimizing for M chips for 4 years, while Windows with Qualcomm is still working on it.
@@EibrahamCx It really has nothing to do with 4 years of optimization. The experience was already extremely polished when the first M1 laptops hit the market. For instance, all the applications Josh identified as incompatible with Snapdragon, like the audio software, worked perfectly on M1, even though many of them did not have native ARM versions at the time.
@@boshi9 exactly; Apple was way more hush-hush about the M series prior to them hitting shelves, and yet everything was so much more polished on release
Most of the issues listed in this video are only from the maker's preliminary testing. That's disturbing. There must be many more teething issues he hasn't even come across yet on those machines
The release feels under-baked and rushed to get to market before Apple's M4 and AMD Strix Point release
@@EibrahamCxthat is not optimization its tailored to the hardware.
@@EibrahamCxwhile advanced users at the aircraft engineering industry will be still using windows.
It is amazing how long it takes for qualcom to compete with apple M series chip. They are already at M4 while qualcomm chip still catching up to the M3 in overall performance
Fantastic review! Very informative 👍 thanks a lot ❤
I already expected some caveats coming with being their first release/1st gen from a mile away. Though considering their GPU performance on their mobile phones, i was surprised to see their gaming performance is not that good lmao.
Linus tech tips once again showing why they are irrelevant in the tech review space
They are the absolute worst, and they think they are funny and entertaining.
Did they release a review on this?
Content quality has been gold! keep up the good work. thanks for the informative reviews!
Why hasn't someone combined these laptops with Nvidia GPUs
Bucz you can't
Arm gpus don't work like that... They are integrated.
@@luigidabro why can't they have dedicated GPUs
@wandering-jew go watch a video about arm gpus. These people can explain it better than me, but basically, the circuits around the CPU are very smushed together in a complex way for better performance.
@@luigidabro thats bs. arm is just a cpu architecture, it has nothing to do with where the graphics card is located or how it is connected. putting an integrated graphics cards into them is a choice independent of them being arm cpus.
Thank you for the fantastic research and reviews!
Gem of a channel and team. Keep up the honest and important work!
0:11 what a line *"They're Hyped like there the second coming of JESUS* 😂😂😂
I appreciated the video, it covers a lot of based, including performance when plugged in, and a host of software interactions. Thank you for lowering my hype for these ones, I though I was missing out but that is very questionable now considering my usecase.
Great review. I enjoy using my ARM based ThinkPad X13s for web development. No issues, I get insane battery life, and the Qualcomm 5G WWAN chip is fantastic, so I can code literally anywhere.
Competition's great. I'll check back in 10 years or so once the platform is mature.
Thank you Josh, absolutely loved the video and have always respected you deeply for all the high-level content. You clearly come from the best technical and engineering perspective when you share your content. It's the stuff I really need to know. Keep on doing what you're doing-thumbs up!
EXCEPTIONAL REVIEW 👌🏾 - I think the enthusiastic M3 comparisons mislead many into thinking these are Macbook Pro competitors geared for creatives and power users. They are clearly not, and it's a marketing misstep.
Aren't these also being compared to the current/last gen Intel and AMD CPUs? We should get the next gen ones soon. The X Elite should be compared to those
100% agreed
Thank you for testing Ableton on these new computers. Not a lot of laptop/computer reviewers pay attention to us audio folks...
Yep, they are rushing an unfinish product
It also seems like they're dipping their toes in ARM bit don't want to take a foot out of x86. They're gonna walk down the middle of the road until they are squished like a grape and forced to make a choice and lean hard into it.
Yeah, it's good for casual user
But like, there is no clear slice of cake for it
If I am casual user,
Says, I don't have any specific software, I want battery life, and I want to use ARM. I can always use Apple Macbook. Sure, it's not Windows, but software support is much better at this point.
If I play games
or have any specific software, x86 is always the choice. Windows on Arm is the 3rd branch after x86 and Apple, any software support or official release will be behind. It really is overhyped, there is no real reason to use it now or soon. Unless things changed in next 10 years, but Intel/AMD is not gonna watch and do nothing.
Please create a video showing the performance of Autocad. This will help a lot of architects in the world. Thank you!
It's a great idea and I'd love to do a video on it. Hopefully next month
@@JustJoshTech thank you so much!
Thump up for honest review.
For casual users, X-Elite is more like compete against Macbook. Mackbook has clear advantages, more mature platform, less software compatibility issues, better performance/efficiency, even battery life. The only downside for Macbook is more expensive, especially for 16GB version, but Macbook will have much better resale values after a few years.
For professional and game users, compatibility is the top priority. Ecosystem takes years even decade to build up. Probably it need another 2-3 iterations for ARM+Windows platform to get enough market shares attracting software developers.
Regardless, competition is always good to consumers. Now ARM+Winodws gives AMD/Intel serious pressure to release power efficiency and good performance laptop chips. The up coming Intel Lunar Lake seems to be quite interesting/exciting one.
Wow, this is the FIRST review I have seen over the last couple of days which truthfully highlights the issues with this processor and doesn't just sugarcoat everything by singing it's praises.👏
These devices for now are like foldable devices not yet optimised , for normal users wait 1 or 2 more years
Your experience with the Samsung Book4 Edge is strange. I wonder if your first one was simply a dud. There's always a percentage of a product that slip through QA and fail, sadly.
It's also interesting to me that you've heard fan noise on yours. If it was the 16, I can't comment (though I realize it's a higher binned processor capable of higher clocks than the 14 inch) but on the 14 I've yet to hear the fans come on.
Also, one very important benefit: sleep actually works properly. I can close the lid and not worry about it waking itself and turning it on the next morning will only see it loose 2-5% battery.
you saved my money, I will wait for software development apps to be widely available and bugs free before getting one
Can we surely say, that the problems because of app compatibility will be solved? Especially for the programming apps?
it's gonna be app-specific, depends on the vendor. Probably cannot generalize on this.
I would say this video is the most comprehensive one done on these new Snapdragon laptops I've seen so far! No fuss!
After seeing your videos as well as some actual QUALITY reviews that arent just influencer ads, I am definitely SKIPPING Snapdragon/Windows on Arm laptops. I can buy an OLED Intel Core Ultra 185H laptop for $800 which is 90% as good with zero issues. OR I can just wait a couple months for next gen Intel Lunar Lake and Zen 5 which are expected to be better than Snapdragon. In no world does buying a $1300 Snapdragon laptop with all its software issues make sense.
Getting flashbacks to Windows 8 on Arm. I remember getting a Win8 tablet (Asus?) which I ended up returning to the store.
That’s just silly. This is so far ahead of the that in all facets. We now have more native applications, better emulation, and capable hardware for cpu tasks.
I’m still with my M1 MacBook Air with over 96%battery and no lag anywhere. Also with 8gb ram. Apple nailed it since beginning
Exactly, my point I've overstated. It's not bad the X Elite chip. it's just overhyped. Also, its dubious that Qualcomm is doing major sponsorship and the tech outlets are being bought.
Qualcomm X Elite chip is no match to Apples M series. It's in a different league. Have you heard of CUDA? Nvidia's monopoly on Windows, that is the majority framework for graphics acceleration? Unlike Windows, all Apple hardware is accelerated by Metal, every Macbook or Mac has the best performance per chip per graphic acceleration.
There's also media decoders and accelerators on the M series, that make content creation and media a breeze. The X Elite lacks that.
Weak GPU hardware, weak graphic acceleration, no media decoders and accelerators. In a price point that is too expensive, 1300 to 2000us.
Without considering the arm compability issue.
While some Qualcomm advocates will state, it will get better. Consider the price entry! It's not acceptable, users who was bought into the hype, will be in a grey spot without fixing until who knows when or until developers decide IF they port their software to arm.
The price point should have been a chromebook competitor, topping 650/800 us.
But why did they go for such a steep price on these chips? Of course Qualcomm compared itself against Apple, to charge an exuberant price.
Cpu performance doesn't equal Apple. There's too many variables extras, gpu, software compability, engines and accelerators, framework, even MacOs has a premium price over Windows.
I hope Qualcomm restructures pricing with OEMs, cause right now the problem is the price point.
Else get a real macbook air, and if you need Windows machine go with Intel or AMD next gen.
Note you can run Windows Arm on Apple M series with parallels. The performance is great and you get both of the two worlds, Mac and Windows.
If the battery capacity of both the Macbook Pro 14 M3 and the ASUS Vivobook S15 is the same at 70Wh, and they last roughly the same amount of time on battery, why is it that the Macbook has such an edge in power efficiency? I’m not very knowledgeable on these matters.
7:35 & 11:35 *_This is the moment of revelation,_* *Snapdragon X ELITE's are more of INTEL than they are APPLE* 🍎, until they figure out how to beat APPLE 🍎 in this, they are NO better than an incremental improvement on INTEL, which is more like a continuity than a disruptive change.
These laptops are probably great the issue is getting native arm applications for windows.
This is a fantastic write up review that actually give a lot of insights and info for these new laptops. I really wish qualcomm was more direct with their models instead of having same name with less performance based on model seems misleading
Picked up the Surface 7 15" earlier this week. I really like it for basic tasks and battery has been great. That Sensel touchpad alone is worth the price of the admission, it's like a breath of fresh air coming from the 16" GB4P horrendous touchpad.... Still waiting to see the verdict on the Zenbook S16 in a few weeks though.
Best review i have seen on these laptops. Great job!
I would love to see how these compared to something like the zenbook oled.
come on, I don't think many people got fooled... most of us we knew what was about to happen
That scatter plot is beautiful! More reviews should have these! It clearly showed that efficiency can vary with overall power consumption, thus a simple performance/power ratio is not sufficient to describe how efficient a processor is. Kind of weird/amazing that apple chip gets more efficient at higher power. Also snapdragon's efficiency at best is the same level with AMD is kind of... disappointing, which also prove that the gap between apple and x86 is probably not ISA but chip design and manufacturing node. (Curious if AMD can be at same level with Apple if on the same node.)
I like it too as it's well done. A small thing is that I would have preferred power measurement using an external mains powered display rather than the minus 7W adjusting method.
Amazing detailed review. The best so far for the snapdragon chip ❤
I don't see where we have been misled. Most of the issues were known before the launch. And we all know that the platform will stand or fall with software support. If it picks up, and we get future generations than this would be a nice step forward.
I am referring to the level of hype bestowed on these. Many people are saying that these are bringing Apple level's of efficiency to Windows. That is simply not true. Hope that helps
I think you should have tested in the different power modes in windows. Because, the slim 7x in power saving mode would have phenomenally different performance per watt. These chips run more efficiently at 23 watts anyway.
good stuff josh, your the only legit youtube reviwer
Finally an honest review
Wow this is a superior video to the terrible LTT one, subscribed
It's a big question which power settings were used for these tests. Particularly considering that these settings are in several different places, interact in weird ways, and are called differently by different vendors
We used as many different power settings as we could btw. So most laptops we tried two at least
X Elite chips are built to be energy savers and to run AI models right there on your device. Yeah, NVIDIA GPUs have more TOPs, but they’re not gonna last on a laptop that needs to save power and keep going all day. The thing is, these chips have an NPU that’s super energy-efficient. It can keep multiple AI models running for hours on end, all on battery power. I’ve got a Razer laptop with an NVIDIA RTX GPU, and let me tell you, it can’t run ML models on battery for more than a few hours!
Thank you for the honest and very informative review and especially your advice ..
Your channel has become my main source for mobile tech reviews. I stopped watching and trusting many popular tech channels especially Linus Tech Tips & Dave2D. I don't believe they are being totally truthful nor do they seem to have their viewers best interest at heart. They seem to be nothing more than an extention of a company's marketing departtment vs being independent reviewers. I won't purchase any laptop without first checking out Josh's reviews & recommendations.
I'm holding off making any laptop purchases until I see what AMD brings too the laptop market over the next few months. It is exciting to see the competition starting to heat up.
Thank you again!
When I was there only 10-15% of Googlers had intel (debian) laptops. Android devs did their compiles on 28 or 32 core linux workstations, and probably downloaded from their workstations, maybe sometimes in android studio on their macs. So Google may not be super motivated to release android studio for windows since nobody at Google had a Windows machine!
Awesome bro is thinking about every profession 😊😊
Give it a few years/iterations… Developers will get on board! ARM/RISC V is the future.
Stop comparing them to a early 2000 PC WITH NO TOUCHSCREEN or pen support. WHO THE HELL BUYS A LAPTOP THESE DAYS WITH NO TOUCHSCREEN? My issue is Windows, not an operating system for servious work. It's crapware & vaporware. The problem isn't the hardware. IT'S THE SOFTWARE. I'VE BEEN RESETTING MY PC FOR OVER AN HOUR TO GET THAT NONFUNCTIONAL CRAPWARE OFF IT.
My Surface Pro Copilot is a huge improvement over the Pro 9. Love the screen
Who should buy one? No one yet. But a few years down these will be very interesting.
The potential is there but I had no faith in Microsoft to have everything compatible at launch with these laptops. It’s gonna take years for these things to have full compatibility
This is the best review that I have been looking for years. I still have surface studio laptop x86, but my daily laptop is Surface Pro X SQ2, I only stick with surface pro for the time being and i possibly go back to MacBook Air.
it would be nice to test battery life on battery saving mode
don't need the full power of the soc to watch youtube or use microsoft office and similar tools at a cafe
Such an intelligent and honest review. Really impressed
Tuxedo is making a laptop with the X Elite that'll run their Linux OS out of the box.
Great review. More grounded and realistic than others I had seen before.
I suppose it's too early to consider one of those. I hope AMD and Intel can put out competitive processors so we can have long battery life and good performance on our laptops.
They could have added GPUs for 3D apps for now
Linux should work with the next major kernel release if I recall correctly. I mean Qualcomm themselves have been submitting patches and drivers upstream.
And I’d never buy a Windows 11 device. They’re basically advertisement platforms at this point.
FYI this set of benchmarks is already invalid because the lenovo amd lapotp uses a specialized low performance chip from amd designed solely for lenovo.
The 7840s is probably the "worst case scenario" for amd.
I'm eager for a transition in laptops but I can wait. What I'd really like is a minipc that I can run Linux on. So I'm in the "wait" camp for all of this. I have no interest in gaming on a laptop (I have a desktop for that) but I would definitely like a good software development platform that's fast and has a long battery life. I don't have much use for MacOS unless for some reason we decided to start using it at work so I have no interest in those machines. I was hoping for a little stronger launch for the Snapdragon X machines but I can/will wait.
Thank you for pointing out windows became ad infested. We should boykott them more.
Great vid. Very objective and helpful.
Any gpu powered pro x86 apps will work ridiculously slow compared to a laptop with a dgpu, at similar price, the second is a must choice, try to do a render from blender, probably 20 times faster on a nvidia gpu with optix, instead of a cpu render on the snapdragon (that have a non compatible gpu)
Hi Josh! I love your videos and am a huge fan of your presentation method. Can you review the new HP Pavilion Plus (2024) 16-ab1000na Laptop - Core Ultra with RTX 4050!
not Josh here, but imho stay away from anything HP :/
What's always missing from rhe equation is Microsoft is ruining the experience because developers will need years of work to port software from x86 architecture to proper ARM... Not just ARM, 64-bit ARM.
Potential rewrite of major software. How long will that take?
As in software such as Ableton, you may get lucky because one company changing and recompiling an entire suite of software, but what about the individual commercial plug-ins?
The x86 translation is no option