News Snapdragon X-powered Surface Laptop 7 gets ‘frequently returned item' warning on Amazon

[bit_user]

This year I bought the Snapdragon based Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x. The Yoga 14" 4K OLED display is amazing, but it has frustrating stability issues that make using it painful to use at times. The keyboard disappears and is only recoverable by booting into the BIOS. The processor begins to glitch rendering videos in bursts with pauses.

I'd recommend reaching out to customer support. There's no guarantee they'll be able to fix either, but at least it should help prioritize their engineering team in working on those problems. The second one sounds like maybe a driver isn't configured for video decode acceleration (or maybe some kind of audio configuration issue could be causing sync-related problems?). The keyboard - I have no idea, but maybe they can fix it with a driver or BIOS update.

Speaking of driver updates, have you ensured you've got all the latest? I don't know anything about Lenovo, but we use Dell at my job and they have an updater tool you need to use, because a lot of the driver & BIOS updates won't appear through standard Windows Update.

Good luck!

 

[beyondlogic]

personally i don't think arm and windows mix very well windows is designed around x86 processors.

huge amount of programs don't support arm it be better if Microsoft is serious about arm processors to make a os based on arm. and it needs proper support not hobbled together otherwise people will get frustrated with it and it will sit on shelfs then get abandoned.

Compatibility is the biggest thing no doubt, but price has to be another large factor. For upwards of $2000 (Snapdragon X Elite Surface Lapop 7 13.8" model with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD, base price on Amazon, currently $1500 on sale) it's incredibly horrid value. To borrow a chart from TH's sister site Windows Central it's not even the best performing Snapdragon X Elite model, and effectively performs the same as many x86 mobile chips, many of which can be found in cheaper laptops with RTX 4060 or better GPUs and larger screens and/or better battery life.

Snapdragon based Windows laptops have a market, it's the same market the MacBook Air shares, that is primarily people who will be generally be running a limited selection of apps (Adobe, Office, internet, etc), such as students or people who make presentations or sales pitches. The problem is that while you can get a fairly nice M4 MacBook Air for $1000 where everything works, you have to pay more for a Surface Laptop where everything doesn't .

Also again suggesting Microsoft Surface devices be included in all MacBook Air and Pro reviews and vice versa.

snapdragon based laptops really dont have a market not unless microsoft fully supports it,

apple arm chips are supported well because apple makes the chips and the os so they can roll out support for it and keep it a closed system they can optimize it.

 

[bit_user]

personally i don't think arm and windows mix very well windows is designed around x86 processors.

Windows NT, which formed the basis of the modern Windows kernel, was in fact designed to support MIPS, DEC Alpha, and PowerPC as well as Intel's 386. Microsoft wanted a proper workstation & server OS, so they designed it to support the leading CPUs in those markets.

Since then, they added IA64 (best known via the first gen to implement it - Itanium) and eventually dropped support for that and the other microarchitectures. So, ARM support is only the latest development, and has been gestating for a long time. I'd expect them to eventually add RISC-V support, as well.

apple arm chips are supported well because apple makes the chips and the os so they can roll out support for it and keep it a closed system they can optimize it.

Microsoft did actually partner with Qualcomm to build SoCs for Hololens v2 and various Surface tablets. That's about as close as they can get without fully designing the CPUs, themselves.

In the server realm, Microsoft has its own Cobalt 100 CPUs, which are based on ARM Neoverse N2 cores:

Azure Cobalt 100-based Virtual Machines are now generally available | Microsoft Azure Blog

Azure Cobalt 100 Virtual Machines, powered by custom Arm-based CPUs, are now generally available in multiple regions.

azure.microsoft.com

It does seem like Microsoft is serious about ARM - it's clearly not just some passing fancy. They've never been so invested in an ISA since x86.

 

[beyondlogic]

Windows NT, which formed the basis of the modern Windows kernel, was in fact designed to support MIPS, DEC Alpha, and PowerPC as well as Intel's 386. Microsoft wanted a proper workstation & server OS, so they designed it to support the leading CPUs in those markets.

Since then, they added IA64 (best known via the first gen to implement it - Itanium) and eventually dropped support for that and the other microarchitectures. So, ARM support is only the latest development, and has been gestating for a long time. I'd expect them to eventually add RISC-V support, as well.


Microsoft did actually partner with Qualcomm to build SoCs for Hololens v2 and various Surface tablets. That's about as close as they can get without fully designing the CPUs, themselves.

In the server realm, Microsoft has its own Cobalt 100 CPUs, which are based on ARM Neoverse N2 cores:

​

Azure Cobalt 100-based Virtual Machines are now generally available | Microsoft Azure Blog

Azure Cobalt 100 Virtual Machines, powered by custom Arm-based CPUs, are now generally available in multiple regions.

azure.microsoft.com

​

It does seem like Microsoft is serious about ARM - it's clearly not just some passing fancy. They've never been so invested in an ISA since x86.

intel 386 is still x86 they used windows nt in there windows phones and it flopped because it struggled.

as for the surface tablets they run windows 10 s or windows 11s i assume thats to keep them in a support bubble.

windows might be striving to support arm but they still need other partners to put support behind it if there trying to make them but Microsoft needs to make its own arm based CPUs for laptops that actually support it there's still a lot of emulation.

and the issue is they aren't cheap lol. what microsoft needs is.


cheap/ affordability/durable laptops if they want to get arm going faster more users using it more adoption.

 

[bit_user]

what microsoft needs is.

cheap/ affordability/durable laptops if they want to get arm going faster more users using it more adoption.

Yup. Definitely agree. I've long said that Qualcomm needs to eat the margins on their PC products for a while, in order to build market share. They keep forgetting they're not Apple, so they can't price their stuff like Apple.