I would like to upgrade my aged 8 years old laptop and I'm completely undecided about which laptop to buy right now.

I considered Apple Intel laptops terrible, bad thermals, overpriced, unreliable, touch bar (uggg), I hated every second working on it, when the company I work for upgraded me with a M1, it was such a huge improvement from any laptop I have ever tried, absolutely no noise, incredibly performant and the longest battery life of any laptop by a lot.

I still don't like the Apple ecosystem, and I would prefer to use Linux as my main OS, but I can't find anything that comes even closer for the price of a Mac Air, If I go with Framework I'll get a less performant machine with a way worse battery, I honestly don't think the premium on repairability is worth for me when I don't have any issues repairing more challenging laptops, at the end repairability will be how easy is to get new parts.

ThinkPads have good reputation and repairability, but for what I see, the quality has gone down the drain in their latest models, and if I go with their premium models I get similar performance to Apple with worse battery, Dell has similar issues.

Gaming laptops are not an option, I don't do any PC gaming and the size and aesthetics are a dealbreaker for me.

The main issue seems to be that until ARM processors become better competitors to Apple, the battery life will be always the bottleneck, and I don't know how good the new Snapdragon X Elite compares right now.

Besides web development, photography edition and video editing (4k), I don't do many demanding tasks, I'm more than fine with the performance of a M1 as the baseline.

As an alternative, I'm thinking about getting a powerful desktop for the demanding tasks and a less powerful laptop with a good battery and screen, but ideally I would prefer a single machine.

Now that there are some specs, development news, and Snapdragon X Elite vs Intel benchmarks from the past couple days to discuss (with the exception noted below), I thought I'd put together a few links for people. I'm curious how people feel about this iteration of technology in an ARM package for development, tinkering, or edge AI applications. And are folks enthused by the possibilities (Windows or otherwise), dislike the price points, or tired of the AI/CoPilot buzz?

Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows features Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Arm SoC for AI PC application development

New Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks Show It's a Serious Contender

Qualcomm Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows is a tiny desktop PC with a focus on AI apps

Debian 12 and Linux upstreaming for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC (January, 2024)

Microsoft is already taking orders for both Surface Pro (11ᵗʰ Edition, $999+) and Surface Laptop (7ᵗʰ Edition, $999+)^[1] orders planned for shipping in June. Each can be bought in X Plus or X Elite flavors, though Wikipedia suggests there are several models of the X Elite so I'm curious which flavors we'll see in MS devices.

^[1] Note that I linked to the "business" versions of the MS Store listings because they get straight to the point with a tech overview, etc. The "business" versions are listed for $100 more than the consumer versions.

Sharing this in ~comp, but if there's a better place for this then I'm happy to see it moved to a more suitable location. Thanks!

I'm seeing a lot of news in my feed about Qualcomm chips approaching laptop performance, such as

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-looks-like-the-windows-worlds-answer-to-apple-silicon/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21105/qualcomm-previews-snapdragon-x-elite-soc-oryon-cpu-starts-in-laptops-

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/qualcomm_x_elite/

Will this turn out any better than the last few times Microsoft tried to break away from Intel? Would you want such a laptop? Will it wake Intel out of its complacency?