New chips, new screens, new gadgets

23:39And I just worry, like, sometimes when I put it in my bag, I'm like, is this screen going to get messed up? I'm still treating it. I'm not babying it at all. I'm just throwing it in my bag and I'm like, okay, whatever's going to happen is going to happen. But I do feel like a stronger, even just like a couple of generations old Gorilla Glass might be a really interesting modification. I don't know what the IPX rating is, but I'd want to make sure it would be like fully submergible. Those would be, you know, I see the Palma more as like a long form reading Renaissance device rather than a digital book Renaissance device.

24:09I buy it. Hopefully it can be that too, though. Hopefully it can create better interfaces for digital books as well, not just for long form articles. Totally. Yeah. And honestly, like I have spent so many years wondering why Amazon has not just built a decent way to read web articles on the Kindle. And if, if books just makes Amazon do that, it will have done the world of great service, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. It's never going to happen. No, no, no. Like you just have to accept that there's a certain size of company that internally just doesn't, doesn't have the willpower to do these things that where that you look at the spreadsheet and you go, what's the market cap of this?

24:43What's the, you know, and it's essentially a rounding error, you know, it's zero and it's just not going to happen unless you have a C-level person who owns it. And I think with Jeff out of Amazon, I don't know anyone there who is an avid old GQ, you know, Esquire reader or whatever. It's like, we've got to make this amazing to read old gay to lease articles or whatever, you know, it's like, so thankfully we don't have to because the e-ink technology is now trickled down to everyone else and companies like books, which we should say, and I think it's important to say books is a bad open source citizen.

25:19I don't know if you know about this, but like they are using, I think Android models or Android software in a way that breaks the terms of the open source license. Oh, interesting. Like if Hacker News ever, like if a books device article comes up on Hacker News, you know, people go nuts about this and bring it up. And I think it is, I think it is important to bring up because they are effectively violating the license. And I, and I think it would be very easy for them to not violate it. And I think we should talk about this in podcasts like this and say, Hey books, can you just be a good citizen?

25:51It's like such a dumb, easy thing to do. Why aren't you doing it? And we'd love to, it would help me even more enthusiastically recommend these devices. You know, I know So anecdotally, I have probably sold at least a couple hundred of these things in the last couple of months. At least these are people just messaging me directly. So I may, it's probably in the thousands of folks who've bought Palmas and are using them. And in fact, anyone listening to this who has bought a Palmer and has had, you know, had an interesting experience with it. I'd love, send, please write into us, tell us what changes you would like to see.

26:23I would love to, I'd love to hear what people, how people are using these things or thinking about it. But it does seem like we're in this moment where maybe, maybe, just maybe digital reading of long form stuff could, the interfaces for it could change, the way we interact with these libraries could change. And it's an exciting moment. I really agree with what Craig said there. I do think this is an exciting moment. I think there are a lot of companies out there being like, we will replace your smartphone. And I think that's mostly ridiculous. But I also think that there are a lot of things that can be done better than the way our phones do them.

26:55and it's fun to watch gadgets explore that. Sometimes they get it wrong, like the Humane AI pin, but there's still something to the idea that not everything should be inside of your smartphone. I've been using the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses as a way to take photos without sticking my phone in my kid's face. I've been using the Apple Watch as a faster way to set reminders or take notes. And I've been using the Palma as a way to read and listen to stuff without the rest of my digital life getting in the way. None of these things replace my phone all the time, but they do some of the time. And I think that might be enough.

27:27All right, enough about E-Ink for now. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about some Windows computers. We'll be right back.

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28:49When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants.

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31:22All right, we're back. We've talked a lot on this show over the last several weeks about this new generation of Windows PCs. Thanks to a new set of chips from Qualcomm and this new co-pilot AI stuff from Microsoft, The whole Copilot plus PC idea, which is a name I really hate, but a concept I think is very cool, feels like it might be a moment in the history of PCs. If these computers are as good and as versatile and as long lasting and as powerful as Microsoft and Qualcomm would like you to believe, this could be really exciting for the whole laptop and desktop industry. It's been kind of a weird rollout, though.

31:56There was the whole issue with Recall, which was Microsoft's big new AI feature that would let you search through and organize basically everything you ever did on your computer. Turns out, giant security disaster, at least in the way that Microsoft initially implemented it. So that's been slowed way down. I don't think a lot of people are going to be excited about it at first. So suddenly Recall feels less cool and exciting and like the future of Windows than it once did. But we're still getting some of these devices. I still have lots of questions. Companies basically across the PC industry are all in on this Copilot Plus PC idea.

32:29We're starting to see tons of new models. We're going to have lots of new reviews. But personally, the ones I'm most excited about are the ones that come from Microsoft. Microsoft has been at, I think, the forefront of Windows hardware for a pretty long time. And with the new Surface Pro and the new Surface Laptop is really trying to, I would say, show the rest of the industry how this Copilot Plus PC thing can work. So Tom Warren and Nathan Edwards on our team have been reviewing those devices. They haven't told me anything about how it's going, and I am desperate to find out. So I am going to use the fact that we are here on the Vergecast to make them tell me things about these new devices.

33:02Let's get into it. Tom Warren, hello. Hello. Nathan Edwards, hello. Hi, David. First, let's just level set a little. I want to know the Microsoft gear you both currently have right now. Tom, what do you have in your possession that you've been playing with? uh so i have the 13 inch surface laptop 7th edition not 7 7th edition that's very important yeah the 15 inch model as well okay the laptop and i've also got the surface pro 11th edition that's the 11th edition yeah 11th edition yeah for our purposes we're just going to call them the new ones because god help anyone who tries to keep all these numbers in their brains.

33:44Yes. And that's both of you. So God help both of you. Nathan, you're on the Pro. Which Pro are you on? I have the top of the line New Pro. It's also 13 inches. It's got, they of course sent the tricked out version, 32 gigs of RAM, one terabyte of storage and the Elite 80 100 processor. So this is like, if there is going to be one that kicks ass, it's going to be this one. Yes, this is their$2 ,100 $500 without the keyboard model. Okay, that's serious business. So I have a lot of questions for both of you about both of these devices. But I feel like the place we have to start is with the chips, right?

34:21Like that is there. There are lots of stories of this thing. But I feel like the question most people want to know is like, did did Qualcomm do the thing here? Are these things actually good? So Nathan, let's start very top of the line. And then Tom, I want to hear your more like mainstream experience. But what have you what have you seen so far, Nathan? How do these things hold up? It does not disappoint me. Really? Yes. That's so exciting. I don't have to think most of the time. I don't have to think about the fact that it's not x86. It's not perfect. And there are like places in which it's like not the top runner, but it's a good laptop.

34:55It's a good laptop, a good windows laptop with an arm processor, which you like really cannot overstate how big a thing that is to be able to say at this moment in time. Yeah. And Tom has the Pro X and he's done a little bit of like digging it out and brushing the dust off. And I want to hear more on that. But like this, I'm not fundamentally fighting the thing, except in the sense that I would be fundamentally fighting Windows anyway. Like generally, with a few edge exceptions, it like just works. Tom, has that been your experience too? Yeah, pretty much. And I'm obviously using the$999.99 Surface laptop.

35:32And that's the base model. so I've been using that one primarily for the past week mainly because we obviously didn't get these beforehand for review embargo and all that sort of stuff so I was like I don't want the tricked out one I want to test what the base model one is because it's got 16 gig of RAM, 256 gig of storage and then the X Plus processor which is I think for me now testing the Elite is around about 20 % better performing roughly so that's kind of the gap but in real terms if you're just using it day to day you're probably not going to notice that unless you're really pushing it.

36:06But yeah, in terms of app compatibility, I'd say like, you know, like the 90 % of the apps you're going to use aren't going to be emulated. And the key one being the browser, right? Which obviously everyone kind of lives in these days. But then outside of that, yeah, there's going to be some app compatibility things, some weird things like Google Drive desktop still doesn't work, but that isn't necessarily because it can't emulate. It's probably because Google's just flagged it not to. So there's like these weird things of like the past 10, 12 years of Windows and ARM being a bit crappy, coming back to sort of haunt it this time.

36:41But Microsoft and Qualcomm have done a quite good job at like getting these software vendors to sort of play ball. And it's definitely a lot better than I've ever used in the past. That is super exciting. Nathan, have you run into anything that just like flatly didn't work? I mean, yeah, so Premiere Pro does not work, but they told us it wasn't going to work. You're going to hate this. ARK. ARK refuses to run. That's disappointing. It's my browser of choice on both Mac and Windows these days, although it's much better on Mac still. And they were just like, sorry, we don't support ARM64. Let us know if you want us to, to put my name in a little form.

37:15Please let me know. Yeah, please, please let it be known that we want it to. If you're listening, we would like that. But I would say that alone, those are things that presumably will get updated over time. And Tom, your point about the history of this maybe being a problem, that there are a lot of folks who were like actually turned it off because the experience was so bad who are now going to have to be convinced to turn emulation stuff back on. My hope would be if the performance is as good as you guys are describing, that that'll start to happen fairly quickly. So even the stuff that exists hopefully won't exist for too much longer.

37:47yeah and with the adobe stuff like so with premiere pro is quite a funny one because they disabled it or like blocked it on the x elite but they forgot to do it on the x plus so i got it installed and then i think they realized like a day later and then it like dropped out of my creative cloud but i still have it installed and i can understand why they blocked it because so i tried to process like a 4k a 20 20 second 4k video right on this thing and it was like stuttering like you couldn't just play it without it skipping and dropping frames and all that sort of stuff i tried to exploit and it said it was going to take five minutes to export and i was like for a 20 second 4g video that's like obviously way too long and for comparison this is really unfair comparison but i'm going to make this comparison anyway i tried it on my desktop pc which is a 4900k and a 4090 and it exported in seven seconds i can see why they have premiere pro blocked on there because it's not a good good experience i feel like if you were trying to edit in that you would come like i feel like you'd make editing mistakes just from the basic like trying to crop a video or in the timeline all that sort of stuff it's just very laggy because it's obviously yeah it's not been optimized and that is a heavyweight app that will hopefully be better later this year once they release the actual arm 64 version which they've promised to Got it.

39:05Okay. So it seems like the performance promises that we've gotten, some of it is like, you won't notice the difference. And Nathan, it seems like that's kind of been your experience that most of the time, you don't have to think about the fact that this is an ARM processor, instead of an x86 processor, which on its own, giant, terrific win. And Microsoft in particular has also made a lot of noise about how it like beats the crap out of Apple Silicon and everybody is making large, grandiose performance claims here. Like in terms of actual raw performance, like good enough is a huge deal. And that's frankly, I would say like that's the benchmark.

39:40And it sounds like we've mostly cleared it. And that's very exciting. How good are these actually that you've seen so far? Well, I want to preface by saying Joe and Anelius has our big benchmark article coming in a few days. That'll be the big word on it. the official word but they are single core they're not as good as the m3 at all okay they do pretty well on most things compared to the core ultra stuff and compared to uh ryzen 8000 but it's like it's not like it's not crushing anybody they do on the reviewer's guide that's very funny 58 faster faster than the M3. It is on very specifically on Cinebench multi-core.

40:22Notably, it has about 50 % more cores. Each of those cores is slower than the M3 single core. There's just more of them, which is, you know, yes, sure. Fair. You did it like good job, but it's competitive. They're competitive, which is more than I could say for any Snapdragon based Windows laptop before. Yeah, just to be in range feels like a victory. Battery life is decent. Yeah, that was the next thing I was going to ask about, because this is hopefully the other big Bry product of switching to ARM. What have you seen on the Pro battery life-wise? So I haven't gotten a full day of battery out of it, but I've been doing a lot of benchmarking.

41:02I haven't had a full day of what I would consider my normal workday, just like doing spreadsheets and Word docs and Slack. Slack is still a battery killer. Every time I look at the battery usage thing, Slack is right up there. Maybe not as bad as it used to be on ARM. Slack is pretty bad on everything, to be fair. We should just do an episode at some point where we just sit and yell about all the apps that are grossly inefficient and messy on computers. And we would spend a lot of time talking about Slack, I suspect. It's funny, it does to the computer what it does to our attention span. Just slowly destroys it.

41:36Tom, what are you seeing on the laptop? um yeah really really good battery life to be honest on the first day i was like working outside and it was like i had the screen at 100 brightness i was downloading like multiple steam games i'm doing video calls working in photoshop all that sort of stuff so i said that was probably more than my sort of average workday of using a laptop but i still got around about seven hours battery life on that day and then in the evening i charged it up to like 100 i was using it indoors at like you know 50 brightness you didn't need the 100 brightness um and i think in around four hours it only drained 25 so okay i was like okay that's good and then i closed the lid and it had like 70 whatever percent remaining at like 11 p.m and i woke up the next day did some stuff and then i ended up grabbing the laptop about midday and it still had that 70 it was like i think i went to went to sleep at like 72 and it had 70 i was like okay that's that's good as well because that's pretty exciting half the time yeah half time you close the lid on windows laptop you're kind of like is it gonna wake like i might just keep this thing plugged in because it's not actually gonna it's gonna just drain the battery um overnight um so i've never seen it do that um it's usually like one or two percent it drains overnight yeah and to be honest i haven't left it long enough for like you know five six nights to see whether that is one or two percent per day or if that's just a you know every time you sort of um sleep but yeah the battery life is phenomenal as long as you're in the native apps yeah as long as you're doing sort of the lightweight stuff so if i had a day i think i had a day where i was working predominantly in like slack and discord and chrome and and whatsapp you know and not not too heavy lifting apps and i think i charged it And I think I got something like six hours.

43:25And it was about down 30 % in those six hours. Wow. Okay. Which is pretty, yeah, which is quite surprising. So yeah, but then if you start downloading stuff on Steam, which is an emulated app. Sure. I could notice it drop by like five to 10 % just from downloading a big game on Steam. Not even playing, just downloading. Just downloading. Just as soon as it needs to do an emulated app, you can feel it working harder. and and steam's quite vigorous when it's downloading and unpacking games on the cpu yeah so it's understandable why it's done that but yeah it's emulated so i'd be very curious to see if there's ever going to be a rn64 steam client and whether that would improve that i'm sure there will be yeah it feels like it's coming but it seems like to me the the the two levels of battery test are like the first is sort of the the cross-country flight test where it's like i can i can use it in the airport and then like watch two movies on it and then get to wherever i'm going without it dying that's like that's test number one it feels like any laptop that can't pass that test sucks and then there's the like use it all day and you know use it and don't charge till the next morning and this doesn't seem like it's quite gotten there but it does seem like it probably passes the cross-country flight test which again for a pretty powerful windows laptop is a big victory.

44:44And at least it's like, it's not as good as Apple, which is pretty easily in the like, I can use it all day and then charge it at lunch the next day with a lot of things. This doesn't feel like it's quite there, but it's almost there. And that's something. I think it probably is. Okay. If you're not doing the emulated stuff. Yeah. As long as you're not doing emulated stuff, I think so. Like I don't do the battery tests that other sort of reviews do where they just have a bunch of tabs or a bunch of videos going because that stuff is it's not real world you know that's the stuff that microsoft always says you know 15 20 hours of video offline video playback like who is that for yeah yeah but i do the real world stuff and i think like i charged it on friday and i used it a bunch over the weekend and then i haven't charged it since friday and it's still has 27 oh all right then yeah we're on to something there nathan it sounds like the pro is not quite as good though it doesn't it doesn't quite hang as well i would say i haven't had the time i haven't had the like extended amounts of time to test it so it was yeah let me tell you cinebench murders murders the battery life as does actually what killed it was blender so if you use blender don't get a snapdragon thing yet like if that's part of your workflow it is emulated and it's not hitting the gpu cores at all it's just pure cpu compute it's brute forcing it it takes a long time and it's not pretty that will like But right now, like if there's an app that you need that's not native yet, that's not to say this won't be a good choice, but I wouldn't go for it yet.

46:13Yeah. And also, if ever a setup was going to set your computer on fire, Blender running on the CPU would be would be the answer. Yes. It got toasty. Yeah, I would imagine. But not on the keyboard because that's detachable. Oh, yeah. OK, wait, I want to get into all the AI stuff. We have to talk about that for a minute. I totally forgot about that. This is very exciting. Tell me about this new keyboard setup and how you've been using it. So the Surface Pro has a detachable keyboard. It connects by pogo pins. That is the way it's always been. Pull it off. It's like a little folio thing. This year, they finally put a battery in it.

46:46Not all of them, but there's the Pro Flex keyboard. It's Bluetooth. It's got a battery. You want to take it off? You pull it off and it still works. And that feels like, obviously, this is the way detachable keyboards ought to be. Yes. Like often they're just like, here is a Bluetooth keyboard or here is a PogoPin keyboard. And you sort of have to pick. PogoPin is great because it doesn't run out of battery. But also if you're in a situation where you want to detach the keyboard, then all of a sudden it's dead. But I love this thing. So how have you actually used it in practice? Like what? Give me the detached use case.

47:21Well, for example, for ergonomics, if you want to put the screen on like a big pile of books to get it higher up and keep your keyboard down below, you can do that. that's kind of the use case as someone i've spent years with like the i would have the screen in the middle and i would put my laptop up on a stand next to it as kind of a second display having being able to use the surface keyboard as the keyboard down on my desk for that incredible i will say that it is 350 and if you're if your use case is like you're mostly at home with the thing running this as like your desktop basically and then you shove it in a bag once So I'll take it with you.

47:57You can buy a lot of really nice keyboards for$350 and then still have room in the budget for like the regular flex keyboard to take with you. Yeah, you can buy several really nice keyboards for$350. You can buy one really nice keyboard. You can also buy one, yeah. It's like a third of the price of the Surface laptop as well. I know, it's nuts. Yeah. It's truly nuts. It's$350 or 500 bucks basically with the slim pen. And like many people consider a keyboard to be an important part of a laptop. Many people are saying, yeah. But Microsoft, their big thing is like, listen, we give you options. You can have the regular Pogo Pen one.

48:33You can have the Bluetooth one. If you already have a flex keyboard from a previous Surface Pro, you can just use that. It's backwards compatible. It's fine. So like, I used to be like, oh, why? This isn't really a$999 laptop. It's$1 ,200, which you have the keyboard. But like, I do actually appreciate the optionality. Yeah, no, I totally buy it. Is there any other hardware stuff we should talk about? I feel like for the most part, the hardware is as it has been, and it's still pretty good. I guess the OLED screen is new. The OLED screen is nice. Is that exciting? Has that changed your life in any meaningful way?

49:02It doesn't change my life. I mean, so it is 120 hertz variable. It goes up to 600 nits and then I think 900 nits of peak brightness for HDR. It's a nice screen. I will say 50 % brightness or whatever, not quite enough. I keep having to crank it up a little bit. And it does have a little faint grain to it at peak brightness where you can see the touch sensors in the panel. Several reviewers have noticed this. We were talking back channeling. Microsoft's like, we haven't noticed. And several reviewers like, yeah. They're like, don't worry about it. You're not seeing what you think you're seeing.

49:33It's fine. It doesn't bother me. Welch noticed it. But no, it's a nice thing. I will say you're still in dongle life. Two USB-C ports. They do still have the Surface connector on the other side, which is like a magnetic proprietary connector, which again, Microsoft is like, listen you want to charge with that that's fine you can charge via usbc that's fine i have it connected to my usually have it connected to my like 32 inch 4k monitor with a usbc and it powers the laptop at full speed it runs all this stuff but right now when you're not hooked in two usb ports c ports is still pretty limiting yeah especially because there's no headphone jack yeah it's not enough i agree i've gotten used to it as a macbook air user for years but then And every time I am forced to encounter a computer with more, it's like, oh, this is delightful.

50:22I have a Surface laptop studio from a couple of years ago, and that thing just feels like it has infinite ports compared to this one. It's just nice. Like right now, so we're recording, and I have my headphones plugged into a USB-C dongle, and that takes up one port. And I have our microphone plugged into USB-C, and that takes up the other port. And that's all the ports. I'm charging from the Surface connector, so I'm glad that that's there. that's it yes i have dongles and gizmos and gadgets galore but like it'd be nice what do you think of the trackpad it's fine it's a trackpad i don't hate it i don't love it so i started using it today after using the bigger surface laptop trackpad for the last week and i keep hitting the bottom of the key like that because it's they've made it vertically smaller yes it is a little compressed it's small you're right i don't like that because because the the slim pen is always on display now as well up top oh interesting yeah so you've lost a little bit of like they just sort of shifted the keyboard down accordingly so yeah i don't love that the little cradle for the slim pen does charge the pen which i do like that's nice because i have an air with the new pencil pro that thing just goes flying all over the place like it magnets to the top to charge but it just it's just every time i pick it up the pen flies off into the distance i'm amazed i haven't lost it yet you might have a magnet problem but that's that's for another day so So wait, let's just talk about the AI stuff here for a few minutes before we switch gears.

51:46The promise of all of this stuff is that it will do on-device AI things that will make everything wonderful. Recall, obviously, its own story. Not here. We'll worry about that another time. What stuff have you guys noticed in the course of testing these things that feels like it is part of the sort of AI PC future? I just want to say, as soon as I said that, Nathan's webcam started moving around, which I suspect is an answer to my question. A lot of gimmicks and a couple slightly useful features. Okay. Hit me with the useful ones first. So the Windows Studio effects on the webcam, some of them are kind of nice.

52:21Like, so they use this absurd, like ultra wide webcam on the Surface Pro that like makes you look like you're being looked at by a four-year-old. You're looming over them. And so they use the Studio effects to crop that down to like center you and it follows you around the frame. Like you've got your dedicated camera person, like the Nest Hub Max does. it's also got fake eye contact thing like nvidia uses oh no that stuff creeps me out i mean yeah it's creepy it feels like a good idea it's one of those things that like once that's not creepy it'll be great but at least everything i've seen so far it it veers toward creepy is it creeping you out right now now you pointed it wasn't until you pointed it out and now i feel like i'm looking too deep into your eyes through a webcam so there's that it does have live captioning, which is on device and it can caption any video that's playing on your computer.

53:12Oh, that's cool. I tried it a couple of times. I tried it in a video call with Antonio and with Joanna and it translated Italian like spoken on the fly pretty well. But it was like, you know, where's the library level Italian? Sure. I tried playing it on Netflix. I was watching Delicious in Dungeon. You will be shocked that it could not keep up, nor did it match the quality of the actual human translated subtitles. But it's serviceable in a pinch, I guess. It seems to be. Okay. A little slow, but like, it's cool that it can do that on device. That's a cool use of the NPU. I've not been that impressed with any of the image creation or co-creation stuff.

53:51Although I'm curious if Tom has a different experience. Yeah, Tom, have you seen any features that have jumped out to you? I mean, there's not a lot. Let's be honest. That stuff feels like a bit of a sideshow to the Windows and ARM stuff, really. I don't know why they need to make such a big deal out of it because it's like they're laying the foundations for this stuff, but it's not quite there yet. So in Paint, they've got Image Co-Creator, which is interesting on the Surface laptop because one thing I should say is that it doesn't support pen input anymore. Whereas you could use the slim pen before on the previous models, you can't now.

54:23The Image Co-Creator feature here pretty much relies on you drawing what you want to see, which obviously you can do on a trackpad, but it's kind of a little bit not the best way to draw. You just want to do it on the screen where you'd have to touch. So yeah, that feature seems a little bit less useful than on the Pro, if I'm honest, because it's just way more easier just to draw. But even still, it just uses like a local AI model, which I think it's using, is this table diffusion it's using? I think. Yeah, they told us it was stable diffusion. And the results are pretty bad. They're terrible.

54:56Yeah. I mean, what would you expect from paint? I don't know how high my bar for quality would really be there. Yeah, I tried to draw like a dog on a beach with a ball and it drew the dog fine, but it just refused to pick up the fact that I'd drawn a ball. And in the prompt, I'd said I wanted a ball. It was just like this lonely dog looking all sad on the beach. And it just looked junk anyway. But even though it's using a local AI model, you still need to be connected to the internet. And I know this because when I first did Hands on May 20th, you could turn off the Wi-Fi and do the image creation in a Photos app.

55:34And it had no filter, so you could pop Bill Gates, you know, whatever. Sure. You could do the typical Mario stuff, and it would generate it. And it was really bad because it's stable diffusion. It wasn't very good. But you could do it. But they've changed that now, so you have to sign in. You have to be online, even though it's using an AI local model to do that. The same is true for Co-Creator. Yeah. Like it generates it on device with the limited model that it has, and then it runs it by the safety filters just in case. That's right. Yeah. But it could just, why not just send it off to a more powerful model somewhere else?

56:06Yeah, it's an odd way of doing that. You're actually doing all the hard stuff in the place where you wouldn't want to do the hard stuff. It's a very weird system. In general, though, it feels like the read on these so far, at least to me, seems like the basics are good, right? Tom, what you're saying is that the Windows on ARM thing is a much bigger deal. That it's like, okay, we've now done the thing. Windows now works pretty well on ARM. We'll solve some of these last remaining apps and use cases. But the question of, so what do we do with that? Doesn't really seem like it's been answered yet.

56:40And I guess maybe that's supposed to be recall. That this is what we get with all this new stuff. but the like what is now possible and cool and new and exciting because we've made Windows on ARM work and because these Qualcomm chips are good doesn't really feel like either of you have found a super exciting compelling answer to that yet is that fair no I think it's because they're pretty much laying the groundwork for this stuff so it's kind of like build it and they'll come that's that's their approach right and obviously recall is supposed to be the flagship feature here um but obviously we can't we can't try it yet so i mean i have been using it for like two weeks on the surface pro x when it was you know you could hack it to get it working um so i've got some thoughts on it but yeah like i feel like even with that it's not like a massive selling point like that that's that's not really i don't think the reason you're going to buy this this laptop it's mainly because you want a good performing laptop that's thin and light and that actually has good battery life you know and as as a base model at 999 bucks is like pretty compelling like it's a hundred dollars less than the macbook air m3 model that in itself is compelling enough i think to get people to buy it so i don't i don't know why microsoft had to kind of like put these ai tricks in there that aren't they're not really that impressive um maybe recall yeah sure that might be impressive but controversial nathan is that where you've landed to kind of very good device nice job but there is this is not like a brand new day for the pc era yet yeah i mean i think that all of the ai stuff is they have this processor and they're trying to figure out reasons to use it it's free real estate they're looking for something to do with ai because ai is buzzy it's on the chips anyway they've got the npus what do you got to find something to do but the reason to buy this thing yeah like tom said it's got good battery life it's a it's nice yeah it's it's it's a third option it's a good option not for gaming but for like normal productivity stuff like seems like a good value yeah and yeah i just kind of ignore the ai stuff for now somebody will find something useful to do with it maybe probably like they've got the compute there even just as it is if that if that module wasn't there at all i don't think i'd notice and it wouldn't change my opinion that much yeah that's fair i'm sitting here looking at my new iPad Pro and I feel precisely exactly the same way about it.

59:03I tried to work on an iPad a couple of weeks ago on vacation and I hated every second of it. And I was like, why can't they just, you know, the refrain, just put macOS on it, whatever, just put a real operating system on it. I will say I got the Surface Pro and I opened it up and I was like, a real operating system. I can have two windows side by side. I can run something in the background. I can do stuff. I can download utilities. I have a clipboard manager. You know what? And I can still watch Netflix if I really want to. It's not a bad setup. Alex Kranz has been running around for two months saying everybody who thinks they want an iPad Pro actually wants a Surface.

59:39And I think she's not crazy about that. No, she's not wrong. I mean, you very much still are using Windows 11 and therefore you're on, you're like, especially on a surface, you're like fully locked into Microsoft's vision of the future of Windows, which involves a lot of opting out of things. In my experience, they're just really trying to push certain things like, would you like to use Edge? How about binging it? I had a very funny moment where I logged into my Edge account. So I use Edge on my normal Windows laptop. And it's like, fantastic. Thanks for using Edge, the default browser. Now you're binging stuff again.

1:00:17That's not the search engine I asked for. Thank you. Yeah, no, I'm good on that. I'm good on that front. All right. This is actually a good segue into a question we got on the hotline. We need to take a break really fast. Can you guys stick around and help me answer this question? Yes, sure. All right, cool. We'll be right back.

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1:04:04All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. Send all of your questions. You can also email at vergecastatheverge.com. Send us all of your questions. The weirder, the better. We've gotten some weird ones, and I enjoy it very much. This week, we have a question about precisely what we've been talking about, and it comes from Dean. Hey, my name is Dean. I'm from Northern Virginia. The question that I have is regarding Windows 11 computers and what's going to happen in the market. Now that the new Windows on ARM units are being released, Will the market be some new style Windows 11 and some of the old ones still on the market?

1:04:46Or do you think soon the x86 architecture will be completely gone and people will only be able to purchase the so-called AI PCs? And I was wondering if there will be a massive, do you think there will be a massive fire sale as the x86 inventory gets cleared out? Do you think it'll be a high-end, low-end situation where the new architecture will be at the high end and the x86 will be at the low end? Just wondering how you see the PC market shaking out once the AI PCs, Windows on ARM PCs come on the market. Thank you. All right, Nathan, you were making several faces during that. Tell me what you think.

1:05:23I do not think that Snapdragon, I don't think that ARM is going to wholesale replace x86 for Windows computers. Certainly not on the low end because, at least for now, Microsoft has mandated 16 gigs of RAM, and I think it's 256 gigs of storage. And the cheapest Copilot Plus PC we've seen so far is about a grand. I don't think we've seen anything under the$999 mark at the moment. They don't really have anything that can compete with like a$400 Windows laptop on price. Nor do they have anything for gaming. They don't work right now with dedicated GPUs. the internal GPUs are not for gaming at all.

1:06:00No. I mean, you can do some casual stuff, but they're not going to wholesale replace. I don't think it's going to be a high low either, because I think there's still going to be your high end x86 stuff, not just for gaming, but for anything that requires serious graphical processing. Also compatibility issues. Like I think this is going to end up at best. It'll be a third option at the soda fountain. And I think a good option for a lot of people, especially for the productivity thin and light space. But yeah, we have a lot of unknowns about how Intel's next processor architecture is going to go, Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake.

1:06:32And Tom, I think, can speak much better to that. Yeah, Tom, I'm curious your read on this because you've been reporting a lot on how bullish Microsoft is on all of this and how much kind of muscle and marketing weight it's putting behind this. And I feel like if I were to squint at it a little, I could imagine a world in which Microsoft is really excited about, you know, Arm being the future of everything on Windows. What is your sense of where we're headed there? Yeah, I think it's, they obviously tried to start doing this since 2012 and it's been a long time coming. And I think this is the beginning of a transition.

1:07:04I don't know if it will fully, you know, displace Intel and AMD. But I do wonder if AMD really has much of a market in the laptop side of things going forward because they're always the second choice anyway. And now this kind of, does this make them a third choice? I don't know, like it's going to be interesting to see how that shakes out. But then Qualcomm are about to rev their chips next year as well, which will probably be coming around about the same time as we see M4 MacBooks. So that's going to be interesting. So I think this is a train that's not going to slow down now. It's kicked off the way it should have done originally, or at least a few years ago anyway.

1:07:39And I think it's definitely not going to slow down. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more PCs and cheaper ones in the 2025, 2026 era. So it seems like best case scenario is not that ARM wins, but that this just makes everything more exciting and more competitive, right? That Intel has to get its act together because there's real competition. And so it starts doing better and AMD starts doing better. And all of a sudden we have a bunch of really good options instead of a bunch of, I would say, increasingly non-competitive options, which is where we've been for a while now, thanks to Intel.

1:08:18I also wonder about that because then it's like, OK, how do you make a Windows that works with everything all of these ways? So I guess, Nathan, is the best outcome here that we get one winner or the other in some meaningful way because it'll make the software better and make everything make more sense? Or should we let a thousand chip flowers bloom and everything will be fine? I mean, that's Windows, isn't it? Let a thousand flowers bloom like the whole thing. Backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, sideways compatibility. like. But that's been part of the challenge, right? Like I think that if you want to describe whatever mess exists inside of Windows, I think you can describe a lot of it to that exact thing.

1:08:56Yeah, you can. I mean, I don't think if there's going to be a winner, an overall winner, I don't know. I just don't see it. There's so much on x86. I don't think it would be ARM. Like they don't have the pull. They're beholden to huge enterprise deployments in a way that Mac, frankly is not they can be like hey heads up we're switching silicon entirely and you're gonna have to deal with it and i don't think microsoft can or wants to do that but yeah maybe this makes things more complicated for developers they're like okay great now i gotta make an arm 64 version too so it does seem like the the idea that these copilot plus pcs are going to like immediately sweep the market and be so much better that they're going to like take over at least from y 'all's experience so far it doesn't seem like we're there yet that this is what we have is like a meaningful new competitor not an entire new paradigm that is so much drastically better than anything we've had before maybe we'll get there maybe buying an arm thing right now is a smart future proofing decision as this stuff gets better but it doesn't sound like either of you would sort of going away say this is the obvious new future and everything else is going to be relegated to the side quickly right is that fair it's definitely important to point out that the the co-pilot plus stuff isn't just arm so there is going to be intel and amd ones um coming um and even even like that listener who asked the question like is is this going to be like a transition there's gonna be a fire sale no like that's not really gonna happen because essentially the premium end of the market is going to be all co-pilot plus PCs from now on.

1:10:37Like that's just the standard thing. Apart from like maybe the gaming laptops are slightly different. But even some of those are going to be co-pilot PCs. We've seen those from NVIDIA and AMD. But yeah, no, I don't think it's like a sweeping transition to ARM instantly, but I think it's like a slow burn. Like AMD and NVIDIA are both rumored to be doing ARM chips for 2025 for PCs. So if they do that, then that puts a lot of additional pressure on Intel. So it's going to be interesting. Yeah, it does seem like 2025 is shaping up to be a pretty fascinating year in this space. We're going to see everybody's chips on the table in a pretty new way with all of this coming out.

1:11:17And we're going to have some real answers to where is all of this headed. Whereas right now, even with the ARM stuff in front of us, what this whole market looks like is still just this much theoretical. We don't have quite the features. We don't have Intel's new stuff. We don't have AMD's new stuff. Like we're almost to knowing everything, but we haven't quite seen all of it yet. And I think next year might be that time. Tom and Nathan, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show. And thank you as always for listening.

1:11:47There's lots more on everything that we talked about from those Surface laptops to my story on the books, Palma, and lots of other stuff at theverge.com. I'm going to have a story about the Daylight DC-1 probably sometime this week. So keep an eye out for that. We'll put some links in the show notes, but as always, readtheverge.com. It's a cool website. And if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, or you live in the DC area and want to teach me how to play pickleball, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing all of your questions and thoughts and ideas and feedback on everything.

1:12:18We have lots of fun stuff planned for the rest of this year, and we're trying to do some weird new stuff on the show. So if you have ideas of stuff you want us to do, we'd love to hear it. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neel, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk more about some Copilot Plus PCs, lots of other gadget stuff, more AI news, and everything else going on in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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