Re: Still lots to do
[Author here]
> E.g., watching DRM- encumbered video, such as Netflix.
I wouldn't know, I'm afraid. I have no paid streaming accounts of any kind. I actually buy physical CDs and DVDs of stuff I want to own. Weird, I know, but nobody can revoke it, and there's no question of licensing. If it doesn't survive an EMP strike and you can't hold it in your hand, you don't own it.
Youtube works.
> I also wonder what the graphics performance is like at this stage.
I didn't specifically look at GPU performance, but it feels fast. I ran some CPU benchmarks and it did well, both single-threaded and with 4 threads (as it has 4 performance cores). It was up around fast Core i7 level.
But really, given the price point, neither CPU nor GPU performance is the point here. This is still very much at the stage of "does it work at all?" and not "how quick is it?" And indeed "does the battery charge? Can I tell?" rather than "what is the battery life like?"
It's a premium-priced, super-thin super-light, all-solid-state laptop with no cooling fans, totally silent, and it can run for about a day -- not a working day, as in a "how long can you stay awake?" day. As in, I'm in a crisis, I have no reliable internet, but I have to keep working until this is done. Some 16-24 hours on a single charge, and unlike a Chromebook, it's usable with no internet connection, and has fast local storage.
If you care about CPU performance but not what CPU, buy a MacBook.
If you care about CPU performance but need x86, Lenovo has other models to help you, and I reviewed the X1 Carbon.
If you need a Windows machine, this will do. There are a handful of native Arm64 Windows apps, and unlike in the Windows RT era, you can have full native desktop apps, and Windows Store apps, and run what you want without jailbreaking.
*But* there are not many and Microsoft has, in a very on-brand way, solved the problem of Windows on Arm64 the worst possible way: It emulates x86-32 and x86-64, through two different code paths I believe, and you can't tell which is which, or turn it off, and there is no way to be sure you're running native code. Task Manager will tell you if it's a 32-bit or 64-bit task but not if it's an x86 or Arm task. There's \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 with the 64-bit binaries in it, and no way to tell if they're x86 or Arm binaries.
It's a mess and I think it's because, like MacOS 8.5-9.2, most of the OS is still code for the old architecture running in emulation and they don't want to own up to that fact.
Marketing defeats technology, once again.