- The second wave of ARM Copilot+ PCs is arriving.
- AI, Recall, and ads in the start menu are all reasons to avoid Windows 11.
- Even Apple isn’t much better these days.
Acer’s new 14-inch ARM-based laptops can play back video for almost 30 hours, Microsoft is soon adding 5G to its own ARM Copilot+ Surfaces, and Lenovo is about to drop its second, cheaper lineup of the same. Is it time to ditch Intel PCs? Not quite.
Copilot+ PCs are billed as AI PCs but are more interesting because of their ARM-based Qualcomm chips, which give them performance and battery life that rival Apple Silicon MacBooks, and they’re starting to take off. Microsoft’s Surface Pro 11 (its iPad Pro rival) is frankly amazing, and ARM Windows laptops from the usual suspects are all impressive and surprisingly affordable for such performance. But they’re still not cheap enough to replace the truly budget Intel and AMD laptops. Worse, the software hasn’t caught up. But the biggest barrier is Windows 11 itself, which is probably the last thing you want to get involved with.
“While Windows 11 aims to simplify the user experience, intrusive ads and mandatory updates like Recall, reduce choice and control. For those concerned with privacy and customization, Chrome OS or Linux may be better options,” Umair Majeed, CEO of software company Datics AI, told Lifewire via email.
Hardware Hit
In terms of absolute performance, Intel-based computers are still in the lead, but it comes at a cost. They run hot, guzzle electricity, and require noisy cooling. Nobody wants that, which is why Apple’s MacBooks are such a great option. They are more performant than almost anyone needs, and yet they run cool and quiet and all day long, more like iPads than laptops.
It took a few years, but the PC world is now catching up, thanks to Qualcomm’s ARM chips, which—like Apple Silicon—evolved from phone chips. The hardware based on these chips is truly impressive, so now you can choose whatever computing platform you like without having to worry about the machine it’s running on. This week at the IFA computer trade show in Berlin, Acer, Lenovo, and Microsoft have all announced new or updated Qualcomm computers, so it looks like the age of hot Intel chips is finally coming to an end.
The problem now, though, is Windows itself.
Software Sob Story
The first and least worrisome problem is the lack of software support for the new platform. To run properly, software makers must update their apps for the new platform, and that’s not happening very fast. To mitigate this, Microsoft has a translation layer that lets you run Intel apps on your ARM PC, like Apple’s Rosetta did for the M1 Macs. Unlike Rosetta, which often ran apps faster than they had been on Intel Macs, Microsoft’s version is pretty bad, with apps stuttering so much that they are hard to use.
But if Windows on ARM succeeds, then that problem will solve itself as vendors update their apps. This brings us to the real problem with ARM PCs—Windows 11.
Windows 11 is user-hostile, insecure for individuals and businesses, and invades your privacy with ads in the Start menu. Yes, advertisements inside the OS. This is pretty bad for the platform vendor that you’re supposed to be able to trust with your privacy, but here we are. The temptation is to stick with Windows 10, and Microsoft seems to know this, which is why it has come up with an interesting solution: Put the same ads into Windows 10, thus making the update seem less unappealing.
Then we get to Recall, which is Microsoft’s feature that constantly takes screenshots of what you’re doing on your computer and analyzes them so you can search later. It’s a neat idea, but the implementation has so far been so insecure any business will probably want to avoid it.
Such is the opposition to Recall that the world briefly got excited when it seemed that Microsoft had added an option to switch it off. But that was short-lived, and Microsoft said the Recall uninstallation option was just a bug after all.
“The advantage of Windows machines is that they are cheaper than Macs. However, with the ads and Recall being a part of Windows 11, many people will convert machines to an alternative OS, or pay more for a Mac that doesn’t come with these ‘features’ that are just more problems,” Bill Mann, privacy expert at Cyber Insider, told Lifewire via email.
Apple isn’t immune from this either. It’s happy to put ads for its own services into the Settings app or to pop-up notifications asking for reviews, and Apple, too, is embarking on the potentially risky generative AI journey with its Apple Intelligence plans.
“Those of us who value agency will build our own machines or convert existing ones over to Linux. Every new feature is a loss of computing power, loss of privacy, and loss of agency,” says Mann.
One future possibility will be to buy one of these Qualcomm PCs, wipe Windows, and install Linux, which has none of these problems. In fact, Qualcomm has pledged to make sure its chips are Linux-compatible in the future. Right now, though, if you want a PC that runs as well as a MacBook, then you’re stuck with AI, Windows 11, and Recall.
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News Summary:
- ARM PCs Are Amazing but Utterly Spoiled By Windows 11
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