Exactly. They're now aggressively competing with Apple with supposedly better performance and better battery life. That's huge. Apple was years ahead with the introduction of the M1 but it appears competition has finally caught up. All of this has to be proven in real life though, but so far all the newly announced ARM devices [0] look like impressive MacBook competitors on their own.
[0] So far it seems this are the devices that have been announced.
Microsoft: Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11
Dell: XPS 13, Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus, Latitude 5455, Latitude 7455
They do some sleight of hand when doing the comparisons during the release today.
The Surface Laptop is physically a competitor to the actively cooled MacBook Pro (in fact it’s thicker).
Their performance and battery metrics are against the slimmer and passively cooled MacBook Air.
Their performance comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Elite when the M3 has throttled (their wording is sustained performance)
Their battery comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Plus.
That they interchange both freely is a strong tell that their devices don’t compete on all fronts like your comment suggests.
The only area where I think the snapdragon X will compete is price, because they’re claiming it’s $200 lower than a comparable M3 MacBook Air (but don’t disclose the exact comparison).
Still, a very strong showing from Qualcomm/Nuvia. However the sleight of hand leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I am excited on having an ARM on a PC with Linux support but I never see Windows as an OS optimized for batteries beyond if they use ARM or x86. The Apple advantage continues to be a complete control of the device from hardware to the operating system, while the bloatware of Microsoft Windows makes an arbitrary use of resources.
This is not to say that Microsoft Windows is not an advanced OS, the problem is that it is not laser focus optimized.
I guess that's true but you can't make a leap like Apple did with their transition to ARM every few years. So it's good to see the competition catch up. And I'm perfectly happy with Windows laptops trailing Apple by a close margin instead of a 4 year gap.
[0] So far it seems this are the devices that have been announced.
Microsoft: Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11
Dell: XPS 13, Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus, Latitude 5455, Latitude 7455
HP: OmniBook X and Elitebook X
Lenovo: Yoga Slim 7 and ThinkPad 14s Gen 6.
Samsung: Galaxy Book4 Edge
Acer: Swift 14