At CES, I did what you're not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It's a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Qualcomm is making a gigantic claim right in the headline of its press release: it says these are "the fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs." I'm sure Intel and AMD will have something to say about that! But for now, the company claims its 3nm chips offer up to 50 percent faster CPU performance than the previous-gen Snapdragon X Elite, while using 43 percent less power, and with up to 2.3x the GPU performance from a new 1.85GHz GPU.
Enterprise customers clearly don't agree, or at least they didn't in January, when analysts spoke of tepid sales figures. Many biz users felt the 57 percent higher average purchase price and a lack of killer apps just didn't tick the box. When we looked again in July, the situation wasn't any better. Businesses didn't care about exclusive features such as Recall.