No, but its a far more nuanced situation than the event suggested.
The hardware is pretty good, but it’s launching late next year, M3 and Meteor Lake are on the market this year. Heck you could argue that Arrow Lake mobile, Lunar Lake and Zen 5 mobile are the actual competition due to release windows.
The GPU drivers clearly need work as seen by the 2 games they showcased performing worse than AMD’s 780m (and likely Meteor Lake), despite being better in synthetics.
WoA is still not good, and nearly every Windows application will need to be emulated for the Elite X/any Arm chips. That wont change anytime soon as Qualcomm has no chance of outselling Intel or even AMD. So why would developers cater to Arm when billions of people already have x86 computers and x86 will outsell Arm on PC for the foreseeable future.
Limited partners with likely limited models. If you want a Windows PC, you can get whatever you want, beefy desktop replacement, ultrabook, even dual touch screen, there are countless options, and countless products on sale. Having the choice of like 12 different Elite X laptops is severely limiting, especially when Windows laptops are all over the place in price points and quality. Obviously if it sells well the number of models will grow, but someone has to early adopt it.
Pricing will probably be $1200+ for these laptops, that’s premium laptop territory, and WoA is not a premium experience, I would not pay premium pricing to beta test for Qualcomm either. We’ve already seen Meteor Lake’s highest core configuration up for pre-order for under $1000 for one model, and in 6-8 months those laptops will be on sale, and significantly cheaper than brand new Elite X laptops.
So at the end of the day, it simply doesnt look that compelling, despite the good hardware, there are a lot of other factors that drag it down while competition is stronger than ever.
No, but its a far more nuanced situation than the event suggested.
The hardware is pretty good, but it’s launching late next year, M3 and Meteor Lake are on the market this year. Heck you could argue that Arrow Lake mobile, Lunar Lake and Zen 5 mobile are the actual competition due to release windows.
The GPU drivers clearly need work as seen by the 2 games they showcased performing worse than AMD’s 780m (and likely Meteor Lake), despite being better in synthetics.
WoA is still not good, and nearly every Windows application will need to be emulated for the Elite X/any Arm chips. That wont change anytime soon as Qualcomm has no chance of outselling Intel or even AMD. So why would developers cater to Arm when billions of people already have x86 computers and x86 will outsell Arm on PC for the foreseeable future.
Limited partners with likely limited models. If you want a Windows PC, you can get whatever you want, beefy desktop replacement, ultrabook, even dual touch screen, there are countless options, and countless products on sale. Having the choice of like 12 different Elite X laptops is severely limiting, especially when Windows laptops are all over the place in price points and quality. Obviously if it sells well the number of models will grow, but someone has to early adopt it.
Pricing will probably be $1200+ for these laptops, that’s premium laptop territory, and WoA is not a premium experience, I would not pay premium pricing to beta test for Qualcomm either. We’ve already seen Meteor Lake’s highest core configuration up for pre-order for under $1000 for one model, and in 6-8 months those laptops will be on sale, and significantly cheaper than brand new Elite X laptops.
So at the end of the day, it simply doesnt look that compelling, despite the good hardware, there are a lot of other factors that drag it down while competition is stronger than ever.
You make a very solid case.