I was skeptical about Snapdragon laptops. A work trip made me a believer

I’ve been a Windows on Arm skeptic for years, but now I can say with certainty that I’ll consider a Snapdragon PC for every business trip I take.

I recently completed a six-day tour of duty in Las Vegas, where I and many of my colleagues journeyed as part of our annual CES pilgrimage. I used the Surface Laptop 7, powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip, for the entire time. For me, that’s a big deal.

I distinctly remember traveling to an Intel Developer Forum conference, most likely in San Francisco, and witnessing an SSD fail completely on a fellow reporter’s laptop. Since then, I’ve generally taken not one but two laptops to industry events, in case one failed or ran out of juice. I know, it’s ridiculous. But I could rest assured that I’d be able to file my story, and that’s what mattered to me.

And it was ridiculous, for even as corporate briefings became ever more populated with power outlets, planes did too. That extra laptop became a rather heavy safety blanket that I’d have to wrestle with not only in airport security lines, but also toting it around on the daily. And with power outlets everywhere, did I really need a thin-and-light? Why not something with a little more oomph for a quick game on the go?

Josh Hendrickson / IDG

But something else happened over the past two years: The power outlets began disappearing again. In the last year, I traveled to Los Angeles, then to Berlin, and finally to Las Vegas. I actually had to haul out a battery pack and charging cord during a session to avoid trying to surreptitiously hunt down a power cord during a presentation. Coincidentally, 2024 was the year of the low-power processor: The Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite, Intel’s Lunar Lake, and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300. All three are superb.

With Windows on Arm, however, there was always a risk. Would there be something that prevented me from getting the job done? I’d gone through this while using Chromebooks. Google Docs would be fine for 95 percent of what I needed to do. But when it came to a resume, I needed Word, and at the time Word only ran on Windows.

With Arm, initial Snapdragon X laptop buyers complained about the lack of native Arm versions for Google Drive, Slack, various printers, and VPNs. But — and I give the Windows on Arm community a lot of credit here — the ecosystem listened and actively solved the lack of compatibility. Today, Google Drive, several VPNs, and other apps run just fine on Windows on Arm.

So, I was heading to Vegas. Would I bet it all on the Surface Laptop? No. I brought a backup laptop anyway. To be fair, I did so as much as to have an extra screen as an extra laptop, so I could refer to a page of notes while I wrote on another. But I didn’t really need to.

Long battery life, no compatibility issues whatsoever

Put simply, Microsoft’s Surface Laptop performed superbly.

I’ve come to believe that trade shows or conferences, where you’re shuttling from a conference room to a booth to a demo suite, are the true test of a laptop, where you simply doesn’t have the time or the convenience to hunt down a charger. Instead, it’s meeting after meeting, waking the laptop, typing and/or inking notes, and closing it. Rinse and repeat. Add in a breakfast meeting, something over lunch and maybe a lingering evening briefing, and you could have hours of uptime.

In all, I had a day or two with five meetings in Las Vegas as well as quiet “writing times” where I had a short period to file a story. I don’t think I ever hit less than 40 percent battery life after a day’s work. (At night, I’d plug in.) I used Wi-Fi pretty constantly while the laptop was awake, usually tethered to my phone for connectivity. I didn’t print once and never ran into a situation where I needed to download or use some weird little app to connect to a hotel Wi-Fi. (If I did, I had a VPN at the ready.)

So no, I wasn’t trying to stress-test the laptop. Instead, I was using it a conveniently as I could to get my job done in an environment that prioritized long battery life. And everything just worked, for hours and hours and hours.

Your mileage will vary, as they say, both at home and on the road. But I can say that I’ve now survived a lengthy, high-tension business trip with no thought to what chip was in my laptop — just that it got the job done. Do I like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite as a business tool? You bet. I’ve learned to quit worrying and love Qualcomm.