Ewan Spence is a BAFTA-nominated podcaster and reporter covering the fast-moving world of smartphones, tablets, laptops and mobile technology. He has covered the mobile space since the early days of the Psion and Palm PDAs; through the rise and fall of Nokia, Symbian, and Windows Phone; to the present-day dominance of Android and iOS.
Microsoft ’s Surface Pro 11 is not the first Surface Pro to be based on the ARM architecture, with 2019’s Surface Pro X being the most notable until now. With the Pro 11 range, Microsoft has gone all-in with a pure ARM-based portfolio at launch. I've spent time with the Surface Pro 11 to look at the impact of ARM in the Windows hardware space.
ARM chips by design, are more power efficient than the x86 equivalent, and the Surface Pro 11’s heart is no different. That means you’ll get battery life above a similarly specced Intel machine. Given that the typical apps running on the Pro 11 will not be heavy-hitting, Microsoft’s battery life estimates of 10 hours of active-web usage and 14 hours of watching videos are born out by my real-world experience.
When you consider how much work is done inside a browser, the fact that Microsoft’s Edge browser is one of the smoothest apps on the ARM platform means that almost every one of “the basics” is covered. One of the weaknesses the Pro X faced was browser support… when it launched, Edge had to run under emulation, and it took Google until this year to release an ARM version of Chrome to the public.
Yet these concerns, while valid, don’t impact most use cases. Microsoft’s emulation layer is mature, and while apps do run slower than a native ARM version of the app, they do run at an acceptable level. Mostly. Windows apps are complicated beasts, and there may be quirks and oddities when using the emulation layer. If there is a key application you need for your workflow, it’s best to find a way to test it out before purchase.
Surface Pro 11 Windows 11 Windows On Arm Snapdragon X Elite Qualcomm Snapdragon Review
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