in our launch review of qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite we praised both the
performance and the battery life of these new laptop chips and we were even
impressed by their ability to seamlessly run software that's designed for
traditional x86 laptops then the very
next day we live streamed our attempts to run dozens of PC games and nearly
half of them failed I mean they clearly aren't meant to be gaming machines but
hey neither is this thing and yet it can play games and that's important to a lot
of people so what is the real conclusion here is it worth the risk that your
favorite program might not run at all if it means better battery life than a
Macbook in everything else you do well we're going to find out today and the
day after that and the day after that and so on for an entire month that's
right three members of our team are going to fully switch to Qualcomm
laptops to see just how usable Windows on ARM is in
2024 so we announced the challenge video over then right
no oh good lord we've still got to decide which of these numerous laptops
we're going to be using for a month and it's not going to be easy since there
isn't a single bad one in front of us or
behind us so many options to tell you
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description let's kick things right off with the surface laptop 7 Microsoft has
been desperate for our response to Apple silicon and their co-pilot plus Flagship
is the first big update to this product line in 5 years Al really wants this one
so much so that he made sure that we had two of them to ensure that he gets one
the sensil trackpad means great gesture controls and haptics and as far as
facelifts go this one was a doozy it's lighter smaller and maybe even Better
Built I have heard the keyboard's a bit underwhelming though so we're going to
have to test that out and there's no time like the present it's definitely a softer typing
experience not the longest travel distance and a little bit on the squish
side but I don't think this would affect accuracy and there's a lot else to like
about this machine it's got a 120 HZ display that does support HDR with Peak
brightness of up to 600 nits for a pretty solid HDR viewing experience it's
in that magic 3x2 aspect ratio that is
incredible for productivity and on that note it has one of if not the best
webcams we've ever seen on a laptop and of course includes Windows hello facial
recognition for instant login she's tempting but I have to ask Alex what
exactly happened here uh that was a little bit awkward you know how we said
that that sensil track pad is really really good uhhuh uh one of them didn't
work oh so when it arrived made a little mix and match yeah so now it's fixed I
like what you've done here I really love it actually and you can see the whole
experience of swapping out the bottom panel and the trackpad at lm. g/f flat
plane you know it's very on brand that you have a janky one would you look at
that that's a lot of washers that just came out of there I really like this top
now I'm like emotionally connected to it we literally just started getting back
on their good side this is not going to
help I'm so sorry Microsoft next up
we've got the Samsung Galaxy book for Edge and she's a little heavier but
there is a lot to like here including that shockingly thin profile that
somehow doesn't compromise on iO with full-size HDMI ports and full size USB
and a Micro SD Storage slot we also get a fingerprint sensor and oh that display
now it's no secret that Samsung makes some of the best panels for everyone
else on the market be they phones laptops or TVs so it shouldn't be a
surprise they have an absolute Banger of a display on this machine on top of the
solid specs Samsung has gone the extra mile to avoid one of the pitfalls of
previous OLED touchscreens where the touch digitizer wouldn't line up
perfectly with the OLED subpixels on this one it's Crystal Clear so you don't
get any of that potential graininess that we've seen in the past meaning this
is an extremely strong Contender I mean it's panoramic now there is one problem
with this we have an international layout keyboard which is a bit of an
issue I didn't even notice that but do you know what arrived literally 30
minutes ago oh a not that one a not that
one oh perfect but if you want to take it there is someone that you will have
to fight oh Samy's interest is seeing
how it integrates with the rest of the Samsung ecosystem he's already got the
phone the watch the fridge so and the ear bud brand loyalty for the win I
guess of course Colin flag
me that's not why Sammy is your name is it no short for
Samsung for the XPS 13 Dell sent us two
different options and on both of them you give up some IO and you definitely
give up some screen size but you also give up unsightly bezels and on this one
in between that nearly frameless design is the very first tandem OLED panel on a
PC guys if this comes even close to the one in the new iPad Pro this is likely
to be the best screen on a laptop period
the only problem is that according to Dell the full HD Plus IPS version of the
XPS 13 gets literally double the battery
life so they provided that option for us as
well would I trade my newfound excellent battery life for an otherworldly ped
display well fortunately it isn't as bad as they said this thing right here got a
solid 12 hours just this one's
incredible look I had to write it in cuz it got nearly 17 hours of battery life
when I printed these off it was still just going in the chamber from the night
before and there's a lot more to like here at least on paper the backpad
keyboard speakers build quality and especially on the full HD Plus model the
best battery life in a sea of MacBook beating batteries it's incredible except
no headphone jack or physical Escape key
D but another there is that's right
Dell's XPS line isn't the only Contender
they sent over and their traditionally lower-end Inspiron machine it's actually
looking very tempting I can't say I'm a huge fan of the mushy keyboard nor am I
that into giving up an HDR display but by simply avoiding many of Dell's foot
shooting design forward decisions the Inspiron family could end up being the
only reasonable Contender for a lot of buyers now with only 11 hours and 6
minutes of battery life it got the shortest of all of our Snapdragon
laptops but it still bests the MacBook
Air M2 by 43 minutes so it's still pretty darn exceptional of course being
a more budget friendly model this is also the only machine out of our options
that's configured with the X+ chip and not the ex Elite so we'd have to live
with just 10 cores in our thin and light for a month 2024 truly is a tough time
isn't it I mean it is but not because of
this next up I'd love to show you this design from framework who of course I'm
invested in I'd love to show it to you but they don't have one so let's move on
the HP Omni book X is kind of a funny one because on paper nothing about it
really stands out and yet this is one of those rare devices that manages to be
more than the sum of its parts it's thin it's light the keyboard is great the
rounded corners on the chassis feel nice in your hands and the iio is even
surprisingly decent for a machine this slim with one of those cute little
full-size type A's the screen also
doesn't get very bright only 300nits Peak meaning that outdoor use in
anything but an emergency is out of the question but it sips power giving this
thing the second best battery life in our tests of course if you want almost
as much battery life and a bigger brighter OLED screen the ASUS VI book
S15 has got to be on your radar although
that's not necessarily a recommendation this has got to be the most all over
theplace laptop we've got see on paper it features the slowest version of the X
Elite but in turbo mode it manages to ramp power to that thing to 50 WTS
making it the fastest real world performer in multicore workloads even
though it's the second slowest out of everything we tested in single core the
screen is 120 HZ OLED and hits 600 nits
but it's 6 by9 and non-touchscreen which
I'm frankly not that into the keyboard and build quality are best described as
fine I guess but it comes with the best IO out of the bunch and comes with a
terab of storage for a reasonable price bucking a trend that the rest of the
industry seems to be happy to go along with where reasonable amounts of storage
cost an ARM and a freaking leg I should have said leg and ARM that would have
been much funnier get it we're going to have links down below to where you can
find pricing and full specs for all of these machines but for now I think it's
time to get off the spec sheet and start comparing side by side and I got to tell
you that tandem OLED almost looks
unnaturally over Juiced especially next
to that HP yeah if I'm honest I did try
this in HDR in this video and non HDR it looks way more natural not an HDR so I
think it's just the color grading I was typing on this to bring this video up
and I do not like this keyboard I like
rounded keys I do not like these flat
hard edges on the keys I don't know I've used these a little bit and I find that
you get used to it and really like it in like maybe 10 minutes that's fair enough
I mean I don't want to disqualify a machine based on a temporary
inconvenience but if there's something that feels good to me out of the box and
I don't have to deal with this overblown gamma tracking nightmare of a display
then maybe that's a good thing Alex did suggest though that I turn HDR off and
see if it feels better oh my my God that is a nice HDR display and that one looks
functionally identical I would say the
most true to life looking of all of them is actually the vi book yeah that's not
surprising OLED and it is color calibrated it looks pretty freaking good
I think the Samsung might have a wider gamut you know the surface has a really
good display compared to the rest of them it does not hold up it doesn't
stand out anyway same with the Inspiron although matte finish I do really
appreciate okay all right crab Rave you
can pack so much music in this bad boy you really can that's only half
volume it gets worse as it gets louder it really does didn't get much louder
did distort
oh In fairness if we hadn't heard that
first it wouldn't be so
awful that sounds good not bad Samsung yeah this must be that Harmon
acquisition I don't even see a Harmon logo on it or
anything gets better when you give it some space
too that's really solid yeah I dig it
how' Microsoft
do it's pretty good it doesn't get that
loud you just desperately want to like this
thing it's fine yeah it's fine it's well-rounded and it's not nearly as
loose and boomy as the Vivo book s but
it does have that Clarity that we saw on both the Samsung and the
dell and not every
Dell not the worst is great yeah I
thought that speaker test would go way better than it did went great for
Samsung yeah it went great for Samsung they were a surprise if not winner
definitely Contender and everyone else kind of realistically we're both pretty
close to picking something I think but there's more to life than subjectivity
and we did some performance analysis on the machines as well are there any that
stand out above or below one thing that
surprised me is that the Samsung on paper has the fastest chip in it it's
the only one that gets the top skew mhm and it is the slowest of the bunch well
the Inspiron lower but it has a 10 core CPU so of course it's slower this is a
really valuable lesson on laptop specs and why we can't take them at face value
anymore I mean I have a thin and light laptop that has an RTX 470 in it see
that face right that that face tells you everything you need to know also very
strange I think some BIOS optimizations need to happen cuz three of our devices
were faster on battery than well plugged in and like repeatedly too high
performance mode in both situations
faster on battery run after run enough
stalling pick one I want this one I knew you were going to do that why 3x2
display touch it doesn't do any
horribly wrong and you do get a type A I
really hate that you have to use the stupid this thing I much prefer just
type c but can it charge on those type-c ports though it can yes oh then you
don't have to use it at all you just ignore it and it's just an annoying
thing that's there see I still consider mag safe to be a feature sorry excuse me
safe magnet I don't know what Microsoft calls it but it wouldn't lean me toward
a device going Sammy I kind of really like
it now there are definitely things I
don't like included number pad not only
am I not an accountant but what it does is it offsets your trackpad to the left
meaning that you're always either sitting with your arms like this or
looking like this a little bit but what else would I choose there is one
honorable mention that unfortunately we weren't able to get here today it's kind
of similar to the XPS 13 and it doesn't have a headphone jack either
I'm probably going to regret this but I'm going to go with the Omni book you think the 300 nits is enough I almost
never use a laptop outside fair enough
I'm going for it and I'm going for telling you about
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lt8 if you guys enjoyed this video uh why not go check out our Snapdragon X
review or that long stream was like 3 or 4 hours yeah where we tried 40 different
games something like that yeah it's pretty eye opening