Microsoft Still Doesn’t Take ARM Seriously

If you have tried working on a laptop outdoors, you will know how it is both a blissful and a frustrating experience. Overheating, glare on the screen, the low battery from keeping the brightness at a maximum… But when the conditions are right, you get this magic feeling of being able to have your office wherever you want to be in the world.

This is what prompted me last year to buy a Surface Pro X, which despite Microsoft’s efforts (or lack thereof), has been possibly my most exciting technology purchase of 2021. Originally, I intended it purely as a tablet I could use for video chatting or web browsing from the garden, but without losing the flexibility to run Windows apps for photo editing, 3D modeling, or other nerdy needs that made an iPad an inviable alternative.

Unfortunately, my friendship with the SPX hasn’t been an easy story. While the app compatibility of Windows on ARM was less-than-stellar, its retail price matches that of a fully-capable device with no compromises. Which is not what the Surface is.

I ended up biting the bullet when a 64-bit app-emulation became available, AND a lucky bid on eBay scored me a device that wasn’t even a year old for less than £400. The compromises of having an ARM processor running Windows became more palatable then.

As it turns out, for normal usage, it’s fine. The screen is gorgeous, and the Surface Slim Pen is amazing for drawing. While it’s no Apple M1, the processor is roughly as fast as an 8th gen i5 and doesn’t feel sluggish. The fanless design is peacefully silent, and the Surface never warms up uncomfortably. It is perfectly happy pushing its own display plus an external 4K monitor, with no stuttering despite moving quite a large number of pixels. And most apps run as intended through emulation.

This is both the biggest advantage and the biggest tragedy of the Surface Pro X. Apps can indeed run emulated, but since this isn’t the hilariously-overpowered M1, performance takes a hit. Battery life, too. And then, you get the odd incompatibility with drivers, which means that a few ubiquitous but critical apps fail to work completely, like Google Drive.

What is extremely annoying is that while MacOS apps have had ARM64 versions since Apple launched the M1 MacBook Air, Windows has had an ARM version since 2011, and Google still refuses to make a Google Drive app.

Some people would argue that this is a chicken-and-egg problem, where Windows-on-ARM laptops aren’t widespread, which causes developers to not bother with ARM versions of their apps, which slows down the adoption of these laptops. However, I disagree: this is a problem that comes from Microsoft itself, which still doesn’t take seriously its attempts to adopt ARM as a viable alternative.

While admittedly there aren’t many, some apps bundled with Windows are still x86-only. Take, for example, Your Phone (Microsoft’s link to smartphones), an app that is supposed to be always active in the background. Because it is running under emulation, it is using more resources and battery than necessary. Again, this is fine because it is a very small app that doesn’t require a lot of horsepower. But it just shows how little interest Microsoft has on the platform ten years after the launch of RT and two years after launching the Surface Pro X as its “go-anywhere, do-anything device” and touting a performance three times faster than the last generation of Intel MacBook Air.

While I intended to use it just like a tablet, it has ended up being my main device while my laptop sits unused in a drawer. It is sleek, light, fast, and suits my needs like no other device in the market. Despite all its compromises, it is fine — which wouldn’t have been a problem if it wasn’t for Apple, which has shown us with the M1 MacBooks that when you take the plunge into something, you can make aim for outstanding, not just fine.