Latest / The Windows Podcast with Fexingo: Microsoft, PC, and Enterprise Windows Conversations / Windows on ARM Is Finally Real
Transcript
- Lucas: So it's May 2026, and I think we can finally say something out loud that would have gotten you laughed out of the room two years ago. Luna: I'm bracing. What's the hot take? Lucas: Windows on ARM is real. Not a demo. Not a promise. Real enough that my friend who manages IT for a mid-sized law firm just ordered forty Surface Pro 10 units for their mobile attorneys. Luna: Wait – a law firm? Those are the people who still have printers from 2009. They run legacy document management systems that need x86 plug-ins. Lucas: Exactly. That's the whole story. The first generation of Windows on ARM, back with the Surface Pro X in 2019, was a disaster for exactly that reason. It used Microsoft's own SQ1 chip, which was basically a tweaked Qualcomm Snapdragon, and the emulation layer was so slow that even basic x86 apps like Chrome or Slack felt sluggish. Plus, a ton of 64-bit apps just wouldn't run at all. Luna: Right, I remember that. It got panned as a compromised device. Pretty battery life, but you couldn't actually do your job on it. Lucas: Yeah. And Microsoft kept at it. They released the SQ2 and SQ3, incremental improvements, but the app compatibility problem never really went away. The turning point, I think, was Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip, which started shipping in devices mid-2024. That chip is built on a 4-nanometer process, has 12 high-performance cores, and crucially, it's paired with Microsoft's new Prism emulation engine. Luna: Prism. That's Microsoft's answer to Apple's Rosetta 2, right? The thing that made the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon seamless? Lucas: Exactly the comparison. Prism is a dynamic binary translator. It takes x86 instructions and translates them on the fly to ARM instructions. And the early benchmarks were promising – maybe 80 to 90 percent of native performance in emulated x86 apps. But the real test was enterprise software. Stuff like SAP, custom.NET apps, VPN clients, security agents. Luna: And that's where your law firm friend comes in. Lucas: Yeah. They ran a six-week pilot with fifteen Surface Pro 10 units. These are the ones with the Snapdragon X Elite and 16 gigs of RAM. They tested their core practice management app – which is a 32-bit x86 app from the early 2000s – their document comparison tool, their time tracking software, and their VPN. Out of 47 total applications they rely on, only one failed to run. And that one was a niche PDF utility that the vendor stopped supporting in 2022 anyway. Luna: So 98 percent compatibility. That's huge. What was the experience like for the users? Were they complaining about slowness? Lucas: A few reported that the document comparison tool took maybe one to two seconds longer to open a large file. But the flip side was battery life. With a 58 watt-hour battery, they were getting close to fifteen hours of real mixed-use work. Their previous Dell Latitude laptops with Intel Core i7s were lucky to get six. So the trade-off was an easy sell for the mobile attorneys who spend half their day in court or at clients' offices without easy access to power. Luna: Fifteen hours. That's approaching M-series MacBook Pro territory. I've heard the new Surface Pro 10 also has a fanless design. Did that cause any thermal throttling issues? Lucas: Not in the pilot. And that surprised me. They ran some sustained loads – like continuous video conferencing and document editing for four hours – and the chassis got warm but never hot. The Snapdragon X Elite seems to manage power really well. Qualcomm claims a 50 percent performance per watt advantage over the Apple M3, though independent benchmarks I've seen put it closer to 30 percent. Still, the gap is closing fast. Luna: What about the IT management side? One of the reasons enterprises stick with x86 is that their deployment and management tools – things like SCCM, group policy, imaging – are built for that architecture. Did Microsoft have to rework all of that for ARM? Lucas: That's a great question. The answer is mostly yes. Microsoft now ships a native ARM64 version of its Configuration Manager client. Intune, their cloud device management service, has been arm native since 2023. Even the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit, which IT uses to create custom images, now supports ARM. So the management overhead is actually pretty similar. The pilot team said they deployed the Surface Pro 10s using the same Autopilot process they use for x86 devices. The only hiccup was that their legacy antivirus agent had to be updated to an arm native version, which the vendor had ready. Luna: So the tooling is there. What about the app ecosystem? I mean, the big productivity apps – Office, Teams, Zoom, Adobe – are they all native ARM64 now? Lucas: Most of them. Microsoft 365 apps have been native ARM64 for a couple of years. Teams was a latecomer, but the native version shipped in late 2024 and it's much better – less memory usage, smoother video. Zoom has a native ARM client. Adobe has native Photoshop and Lightroom, though Premiere Pro is still x86 emulated. Chrome and Edge are both native. Firefox too. The holdouts are mostly very specialized vertical apps – like medical imaging software, or certain engineering CAD tools. But even those are starting to port, because the market is there now. Luna: So what's the catch? Because there's always a catch. Is it price? Are these arm based Surfaces more expensive than comparable x86 machines? Lucas: It's close. The Surface Pro 10 for Business with the Snapdragon X Elite starts at about $1,500 for the 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD model. That's roughly on par with a comparable Surface Pro 10 with an Intel Core Ultra. But the Intel version tops out at 32GB RAM, while the ARM version goes up to 64GB. So for power users who need lots of memory, the ARM version actually becomes more cost-effective. Plus, if you factor in the battery life savings over a three-year lifecycle, some analysts estimate total cost of ownership could be 15 to 20 percent lower. Luna: And what about the broader market? We're talking about the Surface, but there are other Windows on ARM devices now, right? Lenovo, HP, Dell? Lucas: Yes, the ecosystem has really expanded. Lenovo has the ThinkPad X13s Gen 2 with the Snapdragon X Elite. HP has the EliteBook Ultra. Dell has the Latitude 7455. All of them are essentially thin and light premium ultrabooks aimed at business users. And Asus even has a Vivobook S 15 with an ARM chip for consumers. So it's not just Microsoft's own hardware anymore. Luna: That's a big shift. Because one of the criticisms of Windows on ARM in the early days was that it was a Microsoft-only thing. If you wanted an ARM Windows device, you bought a Surface. Now you have real competition among OEMs. Lucas: Exactly. And that competition is driving prices down and features up. The HP EliteBook Ultra, for example, has a 5G modem built in, which is a nice option for road warriors. And the battery life on that thing is rated at seventeen hours of video playback. So the narrative is definitely changing. Luna: Let me play devil's advocate for a second. A lot of enterprise IT departments are still traumatized by the Windows RT debacle from 2012. That was Microsoft's first attempt at ARM, and it was a walled garden – you could only run apps from the Windows Store. It flopped hard. Is there any lingering trust issue? Lucas: Oh, absolutely. I've talked to IT managers who say they still get flashbacks when someone mentions ARM and Windows in the same sentence. But the key difference is that Windows on ARM today, with Windows 11, runs the full Windows desktop. It can run any x86 app via emulation, and it can run native ARM64 apps natively. It's not a stripped-down version. It's the same OS. Microsoft learned that lesson. Luna: And the emulation performance – we talked about the Prism engine. How does it compare to Apple's Rosetta 2 in practice? Because Rosetta 2 is famously good – often you can't even tell you're running emulated code. Lucas: It's not quite at Rosetta 2 level yet, but it's close. In cpu bound tasks, Prism gets about 85 to 90 percent of native performance. In memory-bound tasks, it's a bit lower because of the translation overhead. But for most office productivity apps, the difference is imperceptible. The one area where it struggles is heavy number-crunching – like large Excel models with thousands of formulas, or some data science workloads. But those are the same workloads where you probably want a native ARM version anyway. Luna: So if I'm an IT decision-maker, what should I be thinking about right now? Should I start planning an ARM pilot? Lucas: I think a pilot is the right move. Pick a specific use case – maybe your mobile sales team or your remote attorneys – and give them ARM devices. Test your critical apps. Measure battery life, user satisfaction, and IT support costs. If the compatibility is there, the benefits are real: longer battery life, fanless designs, potentially lower total cost of ownership, and a hedge against any future supply chain issues with Intel or AMD. And the performance gap is only going to narrow. Qualcomm already has the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2 on the roadmap for late 2026, with even better single-core performance. Luna: And the flip side – if I'm a software vendor, I should probably have an ARM64 version of my app ready, because the enterprise customers are coming. Lucas: Exactly. The installed base is still small – maybe 3 to 5 percent of new Windows devices shipped this year are ARM – but it's growing fast. Gartner predicts that by 2028, over 30 percent of new business Windows PCs will be arm based. So the window for getting your app ready is closing. Luna: So we're at the inflection point. The hardware is good, the emulation is good, the management tools are there. The only remaining question is whether enterprises will actually pull the trigger at scale. Lucas: Right. And that's always the hardest part – overcoming inertia. But once you've got one law firm or one bank running a successful pilot, the case study spreads. I think a year from now, we'll look back and say this was the moment Windows on ARM stopped being a curiosity and started being a serious option. Luna: I hope so. I've been waiting for a Windows laptop that can actually last a full day on a single charge without needing to hunt for an outlet. Lucas: Well, it sounds like your next laptop might just be an ARM one. Luna: Maybe. I'll give it a try if you lend me yours. Lucas: Deal. I'll bring mine in next week. We can run some real-world tests on the podcast.