Looks like a good portable machine for work on the move - without needing to charge until the day after a long days work - I might risk one after my tax year
Good review, but the sound test of the speakers certainly didn’t impress me - they never do mind you, absolutely no possibility for any kind of bass response
Edge detection is still pretty good but I can see the lag depending how fast you move your head. Watercolor is a joke though, made no difference. Animated is good to hide skin issues, id like that one lol
Microsoft get a good rep for their laptops - but I am surprised they are so behind the snapdragon architecture - they struggle to even deliver a stable platform for an X86 platform never mind ARM
Overall I think Microsoft are on the right track with ARM, I almost bought one last month but decided against it and will put the money into a new GPU in January - it was just a toy to play with, but Qualcomm still have some ways to go
Hey Mat, thanks, I liked the idea of this one and how you tested it by doing real work on it which we can see. Does it get loud when using premiere pro at all?
I just bought a new AMD laptop, and the new silicon is great for battery life, lasts a good 15 hours for me under most situations. enough for my demands as I charge every night
I think Mini LED makes a lot of sense for desktop computers - I still fear for OLED burn in and this is a work machine really so often apps are left open or the OS on the same screen for many hours.
It is not a concern nowadays to be honest. I have a Dell oled for my main pc and almost 3 years. Zero screen issues. Always follow advice regarding screen auto turn off and pixel refresh and you won't have issues.
Well that’s good to hear from someone who has one. I always reckoned for a tv it would be fine but for a pc screen with static taskbars etc it would eventually cause burn in. I know my oled lg tv has pixel shift and offers some cleaning options but I read about the cleaning options causing more wear than good when you ran them so avoided it.
The speakers didn’t impress me, but the webcam did, is that using new AI algorithms to blur out the background ? was always poor in the past, with sharp cut outs and things moving around in the background
The AI stuff seems to work quite well, I like the planner system - but I would need to use it myself to see how accurate it is. SIRI is still pretty crap and we were promised AI in 2024. and it still has not arrived.
That dutch AI trick at the start was very impressive. I could tell it wasnt real but for the most part it was very accurate and fluid. amazing and also scary
I wanted to get one of these but the reviews put me off a while ago, I guess for what i do they might work out, but whats the point running a lot of stuff in emulation as it heats the machine up and kills battery life
Awesome laptops - very well priced and were on sale over christmas on very - i picked one up, havent spent a tremendous amount of time with it yet, but it seems great to me so far, nice screen too
I did buy one. I have Surface 7, 16 GB, 512 SSD. I got it before Black Friday for U.S. $899.99. You can sometimes get it a bit cheaper. I like it. I also have a Mac M3. I like both laptops, but I like the touchscreen on the Surface and the keyboard. I have the Sapphire. It came beautifully boxed. And, yes, it has great battery life. I do not feel any sharp edges on the laptop when I type.
I think thats a great looking laptop - really impressed with the shape and design - and I don’t mind the lack of OLED, if the blacks are close then its less stress worrying about burn in
I love the battery life, but I dont think I would move from a macbook as a laptop, the Apple M silicon is just too good, and I dont think there was even much of an adjustment for the OS - as I am a windows user - and prefer windows, but the Apple ecosystem is great for mobile work and jobs. much prefer it all, and the resale is higher too ! ive had macbooks before for a year, and not lost a ton of money as I always do with my PC systems
@@benjaminfrohns Thats amazing, I did wonder if it was a joke or spoof - it obviously didnt sounds completely real to you, what gave it away? words in the wrong places at times or just the phrasing? the mouth looked pretty good
@@UnitedAlgorit-el4hy Grammar and word choice are good and typical for Dutch tech reviews. What gave it away was the word pacing. Subtle things, breathing, pauses etcetera.
I wanted this and spent so long moving between a macbook pro on ebay and a new one of these that I just gave up flip flopping and said I would come back to it all in 2025. Which I will, thanks Mat !
I bought one last month, and I like the laptop. I dont know why people are so worried about things not working. I have only had a few problems - I do not use high end apps however, just general use
That AI panning is really clever but is it using a higher res camera to do that trick. Have they crippled the resolution just to be able to show off that AI feature?
The processors in these are good, but i dont think I could deal with the emulation and possible load issues ive read about,. its still some time off mainstream for me
I dont think its too bad, most apps work, and just run a bit slower under emulation, but you still might get issues with apps that are not so popular. always a risk.
I think the performance hit is very poor based on what I have seen if it has to run in emulation and it kills battery life. So while this video was positive if you ended up using one or two apps which are running x64 emu. It would kill it quickly.
It’s definitely really dependant on what you do. I have seen issues with bigger apps too. But you might get lucky and use only the apps that have arm code. Most adobe stuff should be sorted now and Microsoft obviously. Such as office. Not sure on premiere and if all the extras are all native yet.
I heard some apps like premiere were really flaky. Mat didnt mention that so it just have been ok for him . But my concern is people just buy these based on battery life and aren’t aware of the full picture of potential issues
Macbook air - is that really an option for windows users? I know you said you bought one Mat, but does it work well for you? surely you use specific apps for your workflow etc
It’s working very well for work so far. It’s took me quite a while to get used to MacOS coming from 25 ish years of using Windows exclusively. All the apps that I use for my work are available on Mac. Plus a lot of stuff is web based anyway. Mat
Happy New year mat - hope you get plenty of good work out of that macbook, I am a windows user too, but have been looking at the cheaper macbooks for some time.
Happy new year to you too mate! I'm enjoying it so far. Just having separate machines for work and for gaming/testing is game changing to be honest! Mat
Yeah that’s a good idea to create separation I do the same with my work and gaming machines. It is part of the reason I bought a Mac in the first place.
Needs another year of development, I have one from Lenovo and its ok for the most part, but its not very stable with some of the apps I use. its been getting better with updates
The peformance from this processor is great if its not running emulation or crashing. I have a similar laptop and generally it has been pretty good, but I couldnt rely on it for critical use, sadly
Battery Life and screen is the main thing for me - I dont care so much about OLED - they look to be using mini LED which shoud in theory get close to the blacks but suffer no burn in
Nice idea about using the laptop to create the content - seems to work well, was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the webcam too, most of them are absolutely terrible
Great video - its not something I would want, but its interesting to see how Qualcomm focus on battery so much with ARM - I think AMD made good inroads this year into that aspect too. and you woudnt be dealing with compatibility issues or instability
You cant help but feeling windows on arm is a temporary platform they have created which they will drop when Intel and AMD have caught up with ARMs performance per watt.
I like the build in image creator, thats pretty cool - at least they are using AI a little now for people in real world terms, loved your intro however - wow ! thats some AI !
It's a little bit of a dilemma for creative work - while having AI as a tool for certain stuff is great, I don't think it'll ever fully be able to have human like levels of creativity, which is also great (in my opinion) Mat
Nice laptop, I think once the ARM CPU's get better this'll be a real contender. Webcam quality on laptops still baffle me how they're still so bad. Even cheap phones have better quality :P
Thanks for the review, very useful - interesting to see you went Mac - was not expecting to hear that in this review. Glad you guys seem to be honest instead of kissing MS a$$
Not really for me this, too many drawbacks, but it looks pretty good - Apple could learn a few lessons from the pricing as well ! hugely more cost effective
I blame Microsoft for the lack of software. They could have made it trivial to recompile arm In visual studio or have something that just interprets windows api calls.
I like the look of the snapdragon machines, until I watch reviews and start worrying about compatibility and issues with the systems and apps I use. its never plain sailing really. always some problems I see. I think moving to a new AMD silicon laptop makes most sense for the majority of people considering a new laptop - you even get some great battery life with them too
Be sure to report spam - let us know what you think of the laptop in the comments - would you buy one ?
Thanks for showing real world stuff, not just running synethic benchmarks all the time
Touch screens trigger my OCD - they always end up so dirty as you are rubbing your fingers over them all day.
good review, happy new year guys !
Noise suppression worked really well !
I would prefer this is in plain silver or even black, like the razer models used to be
Thanks for the coverage !
Happy new year Mat!
Looks like a good portable machine for work on the move - without needing to charge until the day after a long days work - I might risk one after my tax year
Good review, but the sound test of the speakers certainly didn’t impress me - they never do mind you, absolutely no possibility for any kind of bass response
Edge detection is still pretty good but I can see the lag depending how fast you move your head. Watercolor is a joke though, made no difference. Animated is good to hide skin issues, id like that one lol
its a great looking machine, but too many concerns for me to spend over a grand on it
Nice desktop pc and i love the monitor - thats mega mate
Dont think I would ever move back to Windows for laptop again after getting used to Mac OS and their ecosystem
Microsoft get a good rep for their laptops - but I am surprised they are so behind the snapdragon architecture - they struggle to even deliver a stable platform for an X86 platform never mind ARM
What other options do they offer for storage and memory? you didnt cover it very well
Thanks mat, I think your choice of Macbook was a good one !
Overall I think Microsoft are on the right track with ARM, I almost bought one last month but decided against it and will put the money into a new GPU in January - it was just a toy to play with, but Qualcomm still have some ways to go
When you tested the webcam did you use the webcam sound as well?
What monitor are you using ? is that the 49 inch ultra wide philips screen?
I would prefer silver, that looks gaudy to me, I agree with you mat
Hey Mat, thanks, I liked the idea of this one and how you tested it by doing real work on it which we can see. Does it get loud when using premiere pro at all?
Is it loud? didnt hear a sound test - how loud does it get under load with premiere pro or cinebench?
Is the screen Mini LED? or just IPS?
Why do people think you can just move between windows and mac, most people use one or the other, not both
I just bought a new AMD laptop, and the new silicon is great for battery life, lasts a good 15 hours for me under most situations. enough for my demands as I charge every night
thanks mat
I think Mini LED makes a lot of sense for desktop computers - I still fear for OLED burn in and this is a work machine really so often apps are left open or the OS on the same screen for many hours.
A good point to be fair :)
Mat
It is not a concern nowadays to be honest. I have a Dell oled for my main pc and almost 3 years. Zero screen issues. Always follow advice regarding screen auto turn off and pixel refresh and you won't have issues.
Well that’s good to hear from someone who has one. I always reckoned for a tv it would be fine but for a pc screen with static taskbars etc it would eventually cause burn in. I know my oled lg tv has pixel shift and offers some cleaning options but I read about the cleaning options causing more wear than good when you ran them so avoided it.
How much is the model you tested? £1200?
Thanks!
The speakers didn’t impress me, but the webcam did, is that using new AI algorithms to blur out the background ? was always poor in the past, with sharp cut outs and things moving around in the background
Really the only reason to buy one of these is the battery life IMO, but AMD are pushing forward with their new architecture
The AI stuff seems to work quite well, I like the planner system - but I would need to use it myself to see how accurate it is. SIRI is still pretty crap and we were promised AI in 2024. and it still has not arrived.
The keyboard does not look good to me. nor the trackpad?
That dutch AI trick at the start was very impressive. I could tell it wasnt real but for the most part it was very accurate and fluid. amazing and also scary
I wanted to get one of these but the reviews put me off a while ago, I guess for what i do they might work out, but whats the point running a lot of stuff in emulation as it heats the machine up and kills battery life
Awesome laptops - very well priced and were on sale over christmas on very - i picked one up, havent spent a tremendous amount of time with it yet, but it seems great to me so far, nice screen too
They are always a bargain compared to Apple
Thanks for sharing
Would still take a macbook every day of the week for mobile work and usage. much better build than Microsoft junk
I do love these laptops - bought one on very on their buy now pay a year later schemes - so still have to pay for it !
Very. I know a few people who use them. Enjoy the new machine 🥂
I did buy one. I have Surface 7, 16 GB, 512 SSD. I got it before Black Friday for U.S. $899.99. You can sometimes get it a bit cheaper. I like it. I also have a Mac M3. I like both laptops, but I like the touchscreen on the Surface and the keyboard. I have the Sapphire. It came beautifully boxed. And, yes, it has great battery life. I do not feel any sharp edges on the laptop when I type.
Thanks Mat, good review
No worries, glad you liked it 🫡
Mat
I went with Apple as well, but this seems like a good deal, especially for battery life and power to performance
Was hoping the intrusive/security aspects of CoPilot laptops would have been brought up here, but unfortunately overlooked?
Lovely review, I like the real world approach mat - would have been nice to get a sound test in various situations if possible.
Battery life in real world conditions is really important. Wish more laptop reviews bothered to cover that.
I think thats a great looking laptop - really impressed with the shape and design - and I don’t mind the lack of OLED, if the blacks are close then its less stress worrying about burn in
Wow never seen you guys review a microsoft product before - its pretty good !
Microsoft make good laptops. this one has great battery life, amazing really
Lol that translator is magic. Thought I'd clicked on the wrong video for a moment.
That laptop dock youve got there is pretty cool.
Very useful things to have
I love the battery life, but I dont think I would move from a macbook as a laptop, the Apple M silicon is just too good, and I dont think there was even much of an adjustment for the OS - as I am a windows user - and prefer windows, but the Apple ecosystem is great for mobile work and jobs. much prefer it all, and the resale is higher too ! ive had macbooks before for a year, and not lost a ton of money as I always do with my PC systems
I'm Dutch and that intro sounded very realistic. It only wrecked the "AI" abbreviation, ironic.
How accurate was it? I cant speak dutch.
@@rufusmctavish1164 Good enough to fool me for a few seconds. I could probably listen to it for a full video.
@@benjaminfrohns Thats amazing, I did wonder if it was a joke or spoof - it obviously didnt sounds completely real to you, what gave it away? words in the wrong places at times or just the phrasing? the mouth looked pretty good
@@benjaminfrohns Amazing to hear,. fooled me too. then again I am not dutch 🤣
@@UnitedAlgorit-el4hy Grammar and word choice are good and typical for Dutch tech reviews. What gave it away was the word pacing. Subtle things, breathing, pauses etcetera.
I wanted this and spent so long moving between a macbook pro on ebay and a new one of these that I just gave up flip flopping and said I would come back to it all in 2025. Which I will, thanks Mat !
Good luck with whatever you buy 👍🏻
Wow they managed to get the blur right on the video webcam feature - thats been terrible for years now. about time they fixed it
We need more cross platform ARM benchmarks to properly compare performance between windows and apple.
I bought one last month, and I like the laptop. I dont know why people are so worried about things not working. I have only had a few problems - I do not use high end apps however, just general use
Good feedback to hear. Thanks
Mat's Dutch is formidable. Almost as good as good old Scheteve Mclaren. Almost though. Steve was amazingly fluent after just a few months.
Think Twente fans will never forget that level of prowess.
🤣
Dutch Mat - cracked me up 😝😝😝
😆
That AI panning is really clever but is it using a higher res camera to do that trick. Have they crippled the resolution just to be able to show off that AI feature?
Too many apps I use run in emulation. I passed. Maybe next time
It will get better in time, if they stick with it.
@@KitGuruTech ok
The processors in these are good, but i dont think I could deal with the emulation and possible load issues ive read about,. its still some time off mainstream for me
I dont think its too bad, most apps work, and just run a bit slower under emulation, but you still might get issues with apps that are not so popular. always a risk.
I don’t think it’s as bad as some have made out.
I think the performance hit is very poor based on what I have seen if it has to run in emulation and it kills battery life. So while this video was positive if you ended up using one or two apps which are running x64 emu. It would kill it quickly.
It’s definitely really dependant on what you do. I have seen issues with bigger apps too. But you might get lucky and use only the apps that have arm code. Most adobe stuff should be sorted now and Microsoft obviously. Such as office. Not sure on premiere and if all the extras are all native yet.
I heard some apps like premiere were really flaky. Mat didnt mention that so it just have been ok for him . But my concern is people just buy these based on battery life and aren’t aware of the full picture of potential issues
That would look good in black, what color options are there? its very Apple red rose gold color to me
Macbook air - is that really an option for windows users? I know you said you bought one Mat, but does it work well for you? surely you use specific apps for your workflow etc
It’s working very well for work so far. It’s took me quite a while to get used to MacOS coming from 25 ish years of using Windows exclusively.
All the apps that I use for my work are available on Mac. Plus a lot of stuff is web based anyway.
Mat
Was the contraversial Microsoft Recall enabled by default or not? How much does the AI features depend on an active Internet connection?
Really dont like that Recall feature. Its one of the things holding me back from upgrading.
Happy New year mat - hope you get plenty of good work out of that macbook, I am a windows user too, but have been looking at the cheaper macbooks for some time.
Happy new year to you too mate! I'm enjoying it so far. Just having separate machines for work and for gaming/testing is game changing to be honest!
Mat
Yeah that’s a good idea to create separation I do the same with my work and gaming machines. It is part of the reason I bought a Mac in the first place.
What an amazing intro ! the AI even kept your voice tones etc !
is the platform any more stable now considering the shaky release? Never knew what to do, wanted the battery life, but not the hassles
It’s not been an awful experiment for us as we showed in the video. But depending on the apps you use your mileage may vary.
Needs another year of development, I have one from Lenovo and its ok for the most part, but its not very stable with some of the apps I use. its been getting better with updates
Wish Id seen this before christmas.
Sorry !
The peformance from this processor is great if its not running emulation or crashing. I have a similar laptop and generally it has been pretty good, but I couldnt rely on it for critical use, sadly
Battery Life and screen is the main thing for me - I dont care so much about OLED - they look to be using mini LED which shoud in theory get close to the blacks but suffer no burn in
Great review Mat, but I dont think I would this - heard too many mixed things about snapdragon and it being flaky
Nice idea about using the laptop to create the content - seems to work well, was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the webcam too, most of them are absolutely terrible
Great video - its not something I would want, but its interesting to see how Qualcomm focus on battery so much with ARM - I think AMD made good inroads this year into that aspect too. and you woudnt be dealing with compatibility issues or instability
Fine for general use on the move, but for a guy specifically using an app which isnt completely supported you will suffer huge performance drops
great review mat thanks !
Thanks mate, glad you enjoyed it!
Mat
Not for me, but I do appreciate the immense battery life, thats for sure
Very nice laptop,. I dont think I would buy one of the snapdragon models, but for the price, they look pretty good value overall.
Certainly a lot cheaper than intels range
Performance seems ok, if it works right
Wow how far can they push AI, that intro bit was incredibly well done - better than the AI fans i have seen for sure lol
You cant help but feeling windows on arm is a temporary platform they have created which they will drop when Intel and AMD have caught up with ARMs performance per watt.
Why do you say that ?
I like the build in image creator, thats pretty cool - at least they are using AI a little now for people in real world terms, loved your intro however - wow ! thats some AI !
It's a little bit of a dilemma for creative work - while having AI as a tool for certain stuff is great, I don't think it'll ever fully be able to have human like levels of creativity, which is also great (in my opinion)
Mat
Surface connect - is that a priopretiary connector - it looks like I have seen this before somewhere else.
Yeah "surface connect" 🤣
It’s a really nice form factor. Might be a bit small for me though.
it’s meant to be a portable machine. You can buy bigger ones 👍🏻
That keyboard does look really nice.
It’s not bad at all for a laptop board 👍🏻
Nice laptop, I think once the ARM CPU's get better this'll be a real contender. Webcam quality on laptops still baffle me how they're still so bad. Even cheap phones have better quality :P
Thanks for the review, very useful - interesting to see you went Mac - was not expecting to hear that in this review. Glad you guys seem to be honest instead of kissing MS a$$
Thanks for watching!
I love a Macbook, such good laptops
This is a great laptop, I have one. only issue for me is the fact that I get apps that crash maybe once a week. but its nothing major
Like that screen but could do without touchscreen on my laptop. Forever cleaning off fingerprints.
Yes if you have ocd it would be a problem. But you can just avoid if it need be and use the trackpad or a mouse.
Its a pretty good laptop, my wife has one. quiet and has a good screen
Nice! They're pretty good for the money!
Mat
They have taken quite a lot of liberties with apples innovations but cant blame them because they make fantastic laptops.
Sharp edges - thats been a problem with some alienware laptops for years too. never understood how that got past quality control
Didn’t know Alienware suffered from that
Thought TH-cam had mucked up with their auto translation at the start 😂
I’d buy it. Just need to get 1200 now.
hey good luck with that !
Its a bit expensive you are going right up against apple in that price bracket and apple's arm platform has better support.
Hopefully Adobe get with the program and release a native app.
Microsoft are not known to be fast
Not really for me this, too many drawbacks, but it looks pretty good - Apple could learn a few lessons from the pricing as well ! hugely more cost effective
Fair enough!
I blame Microsoft for the lack of software. They could have made it trivial to recompile arm In visual studio or have something that just interprets windows api calls.
Great laptops for battery life, but too many question marks for me, even at the modest pricing for what you get.
I like the look of the snapdragon machines, until I watch reviews and start worrying about compatibility and issues with the systems and apps I use. its never plain sailing really. always some problems I see. I think moving to a new AMD silicon laptop makes most sense for the majority of people considering a new laptop - you even get some great battery life with them too
Yes it seems like the wise option for most people, unless you are into the Mac ecosystem - which in all fairness is pretty solid all over.