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Microsoft unveiled the new Copilot + PC category and announced new Surface devices during an event at its Redmond, Washington campus ahead of Build 2024. The event was packed with bold claims about performance and AI capabilities, both for the new Surface Laptop and Pro and the wider Copilot + PC category, with some 20 new laptops announced by manufacturers like HP, Dell and more.

Following the event, I went hands on with several devices and demoed some of the new AI capabilities. It was tough not to be impressed, not so much with the AI, but with the slim, light new hardware on display. Unfortunately, so much of what Microsoft said about the battery life and performance capabilities of Copilot + PC devices couldn’t be tested in my short time in the hands-on area.

Still, all the pieces are there for these devices to be all that and more. I left the hands-on area with a feeling that the future of Windows PCs could be very, very exciting, even if you — like me — think AI isn’t the thrilling new development companies want you to believe it is.

Both new Surface devices come in four colours, ‘Sapphire,’ ‘Dune,’ ‘Platinum’ and ‘Black.’ They start at $1,449.99 in Canada and will be available June 18th. Notably, the Surface Pro doesn’t come with the new Surface Pro Flex Keyboard, which costs extra.

Surface Laptop

It’s always interesting when one big tech company breaks out a direct comparison with another big tech company, and that’s exactly what Microsoft did during its event. It showed a couple demos pitting the new Surface Laptop running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip against a similarly-specced M3 MacBook Air. One demo was a battery life comparison showing the Surface Laptop outlasting the Surface Laptop 5 and the M3 MacBook Air. If you’re wondering why the new Surface Laptop isn’t called the Surface Laptop 6, Pete Kyriacou, corporate VP and Surface product manager, said that building up the numbers was getting too complicated. With the shift away from numbers, the focus can be on whether the customers want a Laptop or a Pro, and then selecting the hardware that works for them.

Live on stage, Microsoft also demoed the Surface Laptop outperforming the M3 MacBook Air in a photo processing test using Adobe Photoshop. In that, the Surface Laptop powered through images nearly twice as fast as the MacBook.

It was impressive, but it’s hard not to be skeptical with demos like this. Personally, I can’t wait to see how Copilot + PC devices stack up to the MacBook in real-world tests. I’m also curious to see how things change with other Apple hardware, such as higher-end M3 chips like the M3 Pro and Max, or against the MacBook Pro. Microsoft also wasn’t keen to make comparisons to Apple’s M4 given how new it is, though Kyriacou did say the X Elite’s NPU was better than M4.

The 13.8-inch Surface Laptop is available with either the Snapdragon X Plus or X Elite, while the 15-inch model only ships with the X Elite. Memory options range from 16GB to 64GB, and storage options range from 256GB to 1TB SSDs.

While I couldn’t dig into performance and battery capabilities much at the event, I was able to get a good look at the hardware. The new Surface Laptop is very much a Surface Laptop. Microsoft improved the design without significantly departing from the aesthetics we’ve come to expect from Surface hardware.

The Surface Laptop sports a new display with slimmer bezels and rounded corners, offering a more modern look than previous models. It’s also quite thin and light, though not as thin and light as I had expected. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have a Laptop 5 to do a direct comparison with).

Input still feels great, with that excellent Surface keyboard plus the new haptic touchpad. I’m excited to try that more in an in-depth review, but my initial impressions are that it’s quite good.

Ultimately, I wasn’t blown away by the Surface Laptop hardware. It has small, subtle improvements that make an already nice laptop a little bit nicer than before. The true story here is what’s on the inside, both in terms of the Snapdragon X Elite chip and the new AI capabilities, which demand more thorough testing.

Surface Pro

Like Microsoft’s new laptop, the Surface Pro received welcome but subtle design improvements. It’s still the 2-in-1 PC/tablet experience people have come to love but with a better display and improved internals.

Again, I had expected a thinner device but the new Surface Pro is the same thickness as the Surface Pro 9. This isn’t really an issue, but the way Microsoft was hyping up the new devices had me expecting a more significant redesign than what we got. That said, I’d prefer Microsoft stick with a similar design and offer an improved experience rather than pursue something like a crazy-thin device and possibly hurt the experience on the way. Maybe the next-gen Copilot + PC Surfaces will go for the crazy thin design.

Aside from the design, the Surface Pro now has an OLED HDR display option, which looks great. Additionally, if you want the Snapdragon X Elite, you’ll need to go for the OLED Pro — the non-OLED model ships with the X Plus.

Also of note is the new Surface Pro Flex Keyboard, which visually looks identical to the previous Surface Pro keyboards. The main difference is you can disconnect the Flex keyboard and use it wirelessly. It sounds like a small addition, but I think it’ll make a huge difference for the Surface Pro’s usability and making it easier to use in various configurations. The Flex keyboard’s connector can fold underneath it to form a small kickstand to make it a little more comfortable.

Total Recall

One of the big new features with both the Surface Laptop and Pro, as well as the other Copilot + PC devices announced on Monday, is the Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which enables various on-device AI capabilities. NPU performance is measured in trillions of operations per second (TOPs), and the Snapdragon chips powering Copilot + PC devices boast over 40 TOPs. Microsoft says that makes them the “most powerful NPUs on the market.”

The company detailed several new features that would leverage the NPU performance to enable new experiences and capabilities, but Recall was the one that stood out most to me.

Recall leverages the NPU to create a timeline of activity on a PC that users can search with natural language. On the surface (no pun intended), it sounds kind of creepy. Recall is essentially using AI models to monitor activity, such as by tapping into the graphics pipeline and capturing screenshots of events to build an index of activity with context. However, thanks to the NPU, this all happens on and is stored on the device. Users can also easily pause or disable Recall and exclude specific apps and websites (only in Edge, though Microsoft doesn’t seem opposed to other browsers adding support for this down the road). That means, for example, you can set Recall not to capture any activity that happens on your banking website. An icon in the Windows 11 taskbar shows when Recall is operating and provides access to the pause function and to other Recall settings.

The natural language search makes Recall particularly interesting. In one Microsoft demo, someone asked a question about a document with purple handwriting and Recall was able to find a Powerpoint presentation with handwritten, purple annotations. In another demo, Recall was able to find a conversation in Discord about a dress — that conversation also included a URL to the store that sells the dress, allowing the user to find and purchase the dress.

Recall also has settings for how much storage it uses up on your device. That’s a fairly important setting since constantly capturing screenshots of what’s happening on your PC can add up quickly. Recall is intelligent about when it captures the screen to avoid unnecessarily eating up storage — for example, if there’s nothing happening on the screen, it doesn’t capture anything. The default option for Recall is 25GB of storage, which Kyriacou said would be about three months worth of memory for most users, though that depends on how active a user is (more activity means more captures, and thus a shorter effective memory at a given storage level).

Of all the AI features Microsoft showed off, Recall was the one that seemed most useful to me. I still have to try it out for myself to see how effective it is, but I imagine having a searchable database of activity on my PC across apps and webpages would be incredibly helpful.

Draw with AI and more

Cocreator was also an interesting new feature, though I’m not sure how much I’d use it. Cocreator exists within Microsoft Paint and effectively allows users to draw with AI assistance by merging text prompts with sketches.

I tried this out myself by punching in a prompt for snowy mountains with a river and trees and then scratching out a frankly embarrassing sketch of mountains with a river. Cocreator managed to make an image that actually looked like snowy mountains and trees despite my poor artistic abilities. To me, Cocreator is a better version of text-based image generators since it offers the user a bit more control and input on the final product. At the same time, I think an actual human artist will always produce better art than these AI-generated images, but I could see Cocreator being helpful for less artistic people to brainstorm ideas to take to an actual artist.

Microsoft also highlighted Live Captions, which offers instant real-time translation from 44 languages into English. Live Captions will work across “any video or audio call,” which could be super handy for people who frequently meet with people who speak other languages.

Copilot + PCs also get improved Windows Studio Effects, which enhance your video on calls. New Studio Effects include style options, portrait lighting, eye contact, portrait blur and more.

Beyond these specific new features, the NPU powering Copilot + PC devices can also be leveraged by third-party apps. It will be very interesting to see how developers take advantage of the NPU to power on-device AI features going forward. On-device is a huge benefit as well since it means AI happens faster and doesn’t require an internet connection.

The future of Windows PCs?

After spending time hands on with the new Surface devices and trying out some of the new AI features, the future of Windows PCs is looking bright. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips are promising, the new Surface hardware brings subtle but welcome improvements, and it looks like we’ll finally get some AI features that are actually useful.

But as impressive as everything seems, I’m withholding final judgment until I’ve had a chance to try these things out myself. It’s one thing to see a cool new AI feature in a controlled demo, and another thing to try it out for yourself in an uncontrolled environment.

While the AI stuff was cool, what’s most exciting to me is that it seems like Windows on ARM might finally be a viable option. With the improved performance offered by the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, combined with things like Prism, the new emulation layer for running non-ARM apps on ARM hardware, it looks like Windows users will finally be able to get thin, light laptops that are still powerful and have decent battery life. Kyriacou said the goal was to make Prism’s performance as good as or better than Apple’s Rosetta 2.

If all these pieces come together right, then this next era of Copilot + PC devices will be a force to reckon with.

When I reviewed the Super Mario RPG remaster last year, I called it my favourite Mario to date. The game’s humourous personality and clever riff on RPG tropes quickly won me over, and I finally understood why it was revered for so many years.

Now, I have a similar feeling about Intelligent Systems’ Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the iconic plumber’s latest classic to get a Nintendo Switch remaster. The game’s whimsical story follows Mario as he seeks to find a mystic treasure and, along the way, save Princess Peach from the villainous X-Nauts. All told, The Thousand-Year Door has the same kind of approachable RPG mechanics and abundance of charm as Super Mario RPG while adding even more variety, creativity and depth.

First and foremost, the Paper Mario series — of which The Thousand-Year Door is the second entry — has an unmatched aesthetic. As the name suggests, Mario himself is rendered as a paper cutout, and that extends to everything in the world. Walls fold open when you enter houses to reveal what’s inside. Transitions between areas are marked by the screen literally getting crumpled up. When resting at an inn, Mario simply slips between the bed and the covers like a bank note going into an ATM.

All of this looked great on the GameCube, and so the remaster admittedly provides a more understated visual upgrade. Instead, the biggest changes come from some new quality-of-life improvements, like a hint system and menu shortcuts. The wonderful soundtrack, which consists of tons of catchy original tunes that have the occasional cute nods to classic Mario leitmotifs, has also gotten rearrangements.

But otherwise, this is the same game, and it’s all the better for it. Because even more so than Super Mario RPG, The Thousand-Year Door packs tons of colourful and likeable characters into every corner of its lovably papered world. From a flirtatious disco dog who hits on Mario’s sassy archaeologist companion Goombella, to a spiked fortress guard who gives you a trivia game show-inspired challenge, I was consistently eager to see who I’d meet next.

All the while, the core gameplay is all-around tighter and more layered than in Super Mario RPG. On a base level, The Thousand-Year Door features the same turn-based combat that rewards well-timed button inputs with more powerful party member attacks and reduced incoming damage. There’s also a ‘Flower Points’ (FP) system, this game’s version of MP, that’s shared between the party instead of individualized like in most RPGs. And, once again, each party member has snappy minigames they have to perform for their attacks, be it Mario’s hammer swing, Goombella’s jumping headbutt or the spinning shell slide from the timid Koopa Troopa, Koops.

But The Thousand-Year Door also introduces quite a few spins on that classic turn-based structure. Rather than having three-character parties, you only have two characters, and battles take place in a 2.5D plane instead of a fully 3D one. This results in a greater emphasis placed on turn sequences, as you can generally only hit the first enemy in a row. Therefore, you have to choose which of your two party members attacks first and which command to issue them. For instance, some Goombas have spiked helmets that will hurt Goombella if she uses her standard jump-based attack, meaning Mario’s hammer would be the better play. Conversely, Mario’s hammer can’t reach aerial enemies, so you’ll want him to attack the spiked foe so Goombella can safely pounce on his non-pointy buddy.

My favourite part of The Thousand-Year Door‘s combat, though, is its presentation. When you run into enemies in the overworld (in real-time, no random encounters), you’re transported to a stage, and battles play out like live theatre. Beyond adding even more to The Thousand-Year Door‘s winning jocular vibe, this also informs several exciting features that add some welcome dynamism to battles.

For one, attacks sometimes knock down stage elements like prop trees or a bucket from the rafters, which can land on both your party and enemies to make them dizzy and less accurate in their attacks. In some instances, even mid-command selection, hecklers will lob objects at you, requiring you to properly time a button input to humorously rush into the audience and stop them.

But the biggest role the stage format plays is in the super move ‘Special Move’ system. Successfully timed inputs will rouse the crowd, filling your super metre. This creates an engaging rhythm to battles, especially ones that go on longer, as it creates the feeling that the audience is actually responding to how you’re doing. Once the metre is filled, you can execute such Special Moves as Sweet Treat, a healing maneuver in which you have to time when to lob star bits to hit falling mushrooms and flowers to restore your health and FP. In this way, the Special Move feels rewarding and involved both from a gameplay and narrative perspective, with your battle exploits feeling like part of a grand in-universe performance.

The only problem with this delightful setup is that it sometimes makes what happens outside of battles feel comparatively listless. In particular, the prologue and first chapter of the game throw several scenes of lengthy stretches of expository dialogue, leading to a somewhat slow start. And even once you get past those relatively minor early jumps, The Thousand-Year Door frustratingly relies heavily on backtracking, which leads to further uneven pacing. There is at least an incentive to return to reach previously inaccessible areas through newly unlocked abilities like turning into a paper airplane, but I still wish you didn’t have to visit old locales quite so often.

These aren’t major issues, however, especially given The Thousand-Year Door‘s spellbinding aesthetic, entertaining characters and endearingly theatrical combat. Like an enchanting storybook that’s impossible to put down, I can’t recommend The Thousand-Year Door enough.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door will launch exclusively on Nintendo Switch on May 23rd.

Image credit: Nintendo

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II.

On the one hand, I admire how developer Ninja Theory leverages some of the most impressive visual and auditory work in all of gaming to enhance its storytelling. But on the other, the Xbox action-adventure game’s combat and narrative beats often feel tedious. As a result, Senua’s Saga proves to be an uneven experience that doesn’t remotely live up to the remarkable highs of its predecessor, 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

Those shortcomings start with Senua’s Saga‘s narrative, which lacks the nuance of Senua’s Sacrifice. The first game was rightly praised for its thoughtful, mental health expert-backed exploration of psychosis, as represented through the struggles of a young Pict warrior named Senua. While the larger Norse mythology-inspired plot saw her venturing to Helheim to rescue the soul of her dead lover, the real focus was emotionally grounded in this woman coming to terms with her mental illness. By the end of the experience, she views the voices in her head not as a curse, but as a part of her, and it makes for a powerful character arc.

Senua’s Saga, however, loses that compelling intimacy for the sake of grandiosity. This time around, Senua travels to Iceland to stop a group of slavers, only to get caught up in a larger conflict with the fearsome giants. On the one hand, it’s a solid premise, picking up on the original game’s hopeful ending to show how Senua, feeling a sense of freedom in accepting her psychosis, is now seeking to liberate others.

The problem, however, is that the broader scope of the story often pulls the focus away from Senua. While you’re still always in control of her, the narrative introduces several new characters, such as the slave master Thorgestr, who all hog some of the screen time from her. All the while, Senua herself remains a largely silent character, making her feel like she’s often taking a backseat in what’s supposed to be her story.

Senua’s quietness wouldn’t be an issue if the internal voices that represent her psychosis were more introspective, but unfortunately, they become grating before too long this time around. In the first game, the voices would connivingly give her conflicting messages about everything, which, when coupled with her fledgling hold on reality, led to a surprisingly unique form of multi-sensory gaslighting. But now that they’re not a source of direct conflict for Senua, they generally don’t have anything meaningful to contribute.

Throughout the roughly six-hour experience, the voices bafflingly provide almost unending play-by-play commentary on what Senua is doing. Have to crawl through a tight space? They’ll frighteningly whisper, “She has to go through!” and “She shouldn’t go through!” See a mysterious shadow appear and then dissipate in front of you? The voices will utter, “Why is there a shadow?” “The shadow vanished!” “Follow the shadow!” And so on and so forth.

Any chance for subtlety is gone when the voices incessantly narrate everything Senua does as she’s doing it. Moreover, it does a disservice to the breathtaking photorealistic visuals and expert sound design, which are more than enough to create a potently haunting atmosphere on their own. (If I had a nickel for every time the voices say “turn back” or “you mustn’t go further,” I’d have enough to fund Xbox’s next multi-billion-dollar acquisition myself.)

To be clear, it was crucial that the voices play some role in this game, given that psychosis, like any other form of mental illness, doesn’t just magically go away. I just wish that Ninja Theory found something more impactful for them to do beyond providing some unsettling ASMR-like sounds (as with the first game, you’ll want to wear headphones to hear the trippy binaural audio) and excellent vocal performances. All of this leads to a conclusion that feels rushed and unearned for Senua’s arc. It’s a genuine shame because I was so invested in Senua’s story in the first game, in no small part because it was focused on Melina Jüergens’ masterful performance. Jüergens is even more transformative in Senua’s Saga, too, making me long all the more for a deeper connection to her journey here.

But the voices and other characters aren’t the only distractions from Senua’s story — the gameplay actively gets in the way as well. While Senua’s Sacrifice never had the deepest combat, people forgave it given the ambition of the storytelling from a pretty small 20-person team in 2017. If nothing else, that left room for improvements in the sequel, which was made by 80 people with more resources. Unfortunately, the combat has actually worsened this time around, seemingly due to a misguided effort to streamline everything for the sake of being “cinematic.”

On paper, having light and heavy melee attacks, as well as a parry and dodge, should result in at least a serviceable combat system, but that never comes. In practice, the heavy attack feels too slow, making it far more effective to simply spam the lighter alternative. Meanwhile, the small handful of enemy types, which includes standard soldiers, axe throwers and fire breathers, are all defeated in exactly the same way. Attack a couple of times, dodge and repeat. Sure, you’re encouraged to use the parry system for instant kills, but it feels inconsistent in how often it registers your timed inputs. Landing your attacks will also fill up a tool that lets you temporarily slow down enemies, but I found welcome solely for its aid in mercifully helping me clear fights quicker, rather than it being genuinely rewarding in its own right.

Adding to the mechanical simplicity is the rigidity of the battles themselves. Simply put, you only ever fight one enemy at a time versus having to fend off multiple in Senua’s Sacrifice. In losing that kineticism, Senua’s Saga‘s combat feels painfully on rails. After defeating one enemy, Senua will turn around (or, occasionally, get tackled or pushed into another foe) to start the next skirmish. Every combat encounter plays out like this.

During its promotion of Senua’s Saga, Ninja Theory has touted that it spent 69 days on motion capture for combat alone versus a mere two for the original game. And sure enough, that results in an impressive variety of animations for slashes, stabs, dodges and parries, but that commendable work is nonetheless squandered on a combat system that is itself so stagnant. This led me to actively dread what trite battle I’d come across next.

Thankfully, the puzzles fare a bit better, revisiting the psychosis-inspired “finding matching symbols in the environment” gimmick from Senua’s Sacrifice. They’re likewise often painfully simple, but they at least allow Senua’s Saga to play around with space and time in some aesthetically stunning ways, particularly when they warp the layout of the world around you. And outside of them, there’s an unmitigated beauty to walking through the world and soaking in the vistas, adding texture to Senua’s perilous quest.

All in all, though, I often just found myself checked out of Senua’s Saga, and that hurts to say. I loved my time with Senua’s Sacrifice so much that it remains one of my biggest highlights of 2017, a year that had the likes of Breath of the Wild and Persona 5. Senua’s Saga, however, lacks that impact, losing the strong sense of narrative focus and atmosphere while also actively making combat far less engaging.

I still love Senua, especially for Jürgens’ achingly raw performance and the character’s noble and inspiring crusade in the sequel, and I’m in awe of Ninja Theory’s vast technical prowess. But overall, Senua’s Saga is a thoroughly disappointing sequel to one of last generation’s most unique and gripping experiences.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is now available exclusively on Xbox Series X/S and PC. It’s also on Xbox Game Pass.

Image credit: Xbox

Indika is unlike any game I’ve ever played. Developer Odd Meter takes a familiar concept — a young nun struggling with her faith — and runs wild with it, using well-worn gameplay tropes to provide fascinating ruminations on theology.

I’m hesitant to say much more because going in dark, as I did, is the best way to experience this game. But for those who want a bit more information, I’ll elaborate.

In the third-person adventure game, you play as Indika, an ostracized Orthodox nun in an alternate Russia who is sent by the Church to deliver a mysterious letter. Along the way, she meets Ilya, an escaped prisoner who clings to his own religious beliefs as he’s slowly dying from a gangrenous arm, and decides to help him.

But what could have been a fairly rote heroic road trip becomes something far more interesting due to Indika’s other travel companion, the Devil himself. And unlike a lot of popular nun stories, which lean into horrific demonic imagery, Indika‘s depiction of Satan is far more playful, a Rumpelstiltskin-like figure who constantly questions the Church’s teachings.

This results in some thought-provoking questions being raised about the likes of sin, suffering and identity. And because these theological quandaries are centred around three characters with their own viewpoints, Indika commendably explores the shades of grey in between everything. As someone who has often had a cynical view of religion due to overbearing and hypocritical family members, I appreciated Odd Meter’s more nuanced exploration of faith that doesn’t provide easy answers or devolve into simple platitudes about religion being inherently “good” or “bad.”

Adding even more texture to the entire four-hour experience is a rich sense of dark humour and surreal imagery throughout. Indika sees a little chubby man run out of a sister’s mouth. A pair of soldiers nonchalantly talk to a man who’s been impaled by rebar. Abnormally large architecture and animals lend an almost Odyssean feeling to Indika’s quest. An RPG-like progression system that rewards you with glowing points and chiptune to level up attributes like guilt and grief, which have no actual bearing on the gameplay but further touch on the neverending pursuit of piety. Odd Meter deftly uses all of this absurdity to balance the more serious narrative and thematic beats, which become particularly heavy in the final hour.

Indika also uses its often rudimentary gameplay to enhance its religious themes in some impressively clever ways. In one early scene, Indika is instructed to fill and deliver buckets of water in one particular way, a laborious task that the Devil dryly points out is inefficient. Later on, Indika has to ascend a seemingly neverending tower while weighing the sin of reading a private letter, leading the Devil to challenge her to quantify the act relative to a series of supposedly “greater” sins.

But the most brilliant bit of gameplay that best illustrates her crisis of faith comes during a few sequences in which the Devil’s thoughts become overwhelming, leading the world, which is normally represented through a muted grey palette, to be torn asunder in eerie red hues. It’s in these moments that you have to direct Indika to alternate between praying and absorbing these thoughts to shift the world back and forth and clear a path, and it makes for a compelling mechanical representation of a young woman’s inner conflict and the importance of curiosity.

Not all of Indika is as inspired, however. Some minigames, like controlling painfully clunky cranes or vehicles to clear a path for Indika and Ilya, feel like padding, while others, such as when you’re being chased by a nightmarish dog, have frustrating “instant death” fail states. Even the sporadic flashback sequences, which are delightfully represented through striking retro-inspired pixel art, have tedious platforming challenges that get in the way of the otherwise intriguing revelations these sections provide about what led Indika to join the Church.

Thankfully, those annoyances aren’t enough to detract from everything that Indika does right. It’s a game that blends quirky humour, tried-and-true gameplay conventions and a riveting religious narrative to create a wholly unique interactive experience. You’ll definitely want to put your faith in this one.

Indika is now available on PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam).

About a month ago, I wrote about my favourite iPhone charging dock, and since then I’ve also been testing a USB-C cable from the same company.

The cable itself is a fairly standard USB 2.0 cable with support for 60-watt fast charging, but the real magic is on the outside. The team at Kuxiu has coated the outer sheath of the cable with a magnetic powder that allows the cord to stick to itself. It’s a small feature, but over the last month, it’s worked well enough that this is now my go-to travel charging cable.

I typically use the older red OnePlus USB-C to C cables since they’re solid quality and I love red, or Apple’s braided cables since they’re small and wrap up quite tight. However, I need to use velcro cable ties with those and I lose them all the time. Plus, let’s face it, it’s pretty annoying having to wrap and unwrap a little piece of velcro every time you want to use a cable.

That’s where this cable comes in. It holds itself in place when you wrap it up with no extra hardware needed. I was really skeptical at first since it didn’t feel like it had that strong of a magnetic pull, but after all my testing, it just works and hasn’t let me down. Also, how could it, if it unwraps it’s still pretty hard to get tangled because of how robust it is. That said, most of the time I pulled it out of my bag, it was still wound up nicely.

There are a few upgrades I’d love to see the company make, but compared to a regular cable, this one is so much easier to pack up and it just feels premium to use. Compared to how thin Apple’s braided cables feel, this option feels like it will last much longer.

It works by having half of the cable coated in positively polarized magnets and the other half in negative magnets. This means when you coil it in a specific way, it will stick together in a neat little bundle. There is a bit of trial and error to getting used to this though, since there are no visual markings to signify which side sticks to which. After a while, I got used to it, but finding a way to have half the cable blue and the other half red would have been visually striking and easier to use.

That said, after a week or so of use, I adapted to it and could coil the cable without error most of the time. The magnets aren’t incredibly strong, but they’re enough to hold the regular three-foot cable wound up. If you get annoyed at cables being loose in your bag or lose cable ties often, this could be a good option.

The magnetic cable has PD3.0, allowing for fast charging speeds of up to 60 watts if you have a device that supports it like a MacBook and a beefy charger. It is only rated for data transfer speeds of 48oMbps, which isn’t overly fast compared to the 10GBps cables you can get with most external hard drives, but it is enough to transfer a few files in a pinch. If you don’t have to move a lot of media, this can be a perfect all-in-one cable.

Kuxiu sells two versions of this cable. One has USB-C on both ends and the other is USB-C to Lightning for older iPhones. Both are 3.3 feet. I’d love to see a six-foot option in the future, but for now, I’m at least satisfied to have one cable that I know won’t get tangled up in my bag.

You can buy the cable from the Kuxiu website as of the time of writing for $21.

There’s nothing quite like an orchestra. Being surrounded by a crowd of similarly impassioned people as you take in a grand performance from a talented group of musicians is truly awesome.

 

And what I particularly love about the orchestra is that it can be so many different things. There’s the more traditional, like Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, to something more pop-culture-focused, where an orchestra performs the music live as you watch a movie. Over the past few months, I’ve particularly enjoyed the latter, getting to watch films like the original Superman and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to the tune of the wonderful Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO).

But it was my latest TSO show that was most relevant to my interests. On May 25th and 26th, conductor Andy Brick led the TSO through a highly enjoyable two-hour show featuring symphonic soundtrack music from a variety of video games. In total, over a dozen songs were picked from the likes of World of Warcraft (Jason Hayes et al), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Marcin Przybyłowicz and Mikołaj Stroiński), Destiny 2 (Michael Salvatori et al), BioShock (Garry Schyman) and Ori and the Blind Forest (Gareth Coker).

Accompanying these performances was an HD screen featuring footage from each game. Not every video game concert does this, and while that enhances the atmosphere in some cases, I do generally prefer to have the accompanying b-roll, especially to better expose me to titles I’m not as familiar with, like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2. 

That said, there were some odd choices about the kinds of footage that was shown; some titles, like The Witcher 3 (one of my all-time favourite games), had in-game scenes stitched together to tell more of a story, while others, like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (Brian Tyler), was purely just cinematic trailers. The gaming industry is already routinely criticized for relying on CG instead of actual gameplay, and it felt especially odd to go that route for titles that have been out for years.

On the flip side, Brick, who commendably brought the first symphonic video game concert to the west, made for a likable MC. In between conducting each stretch of performances, he would provide little synopses of each game, which was especially nice for the parents, partners and other casual attendees who no doubt accompanied some of the more hardcore gamers in the audience.

I also appreciated that Brick, likely drawing from his extensive history conducting video game orchestras, gathered a solid assortment of titles. Titles like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars provide the more traditional orchestral scores, while The Witcher 3 offers more Slavic-inspired tunes and Black Flag gave us a small troupe of enthusiastic singers to perform a pirate shanty. Even more inspired was the full “Cohen’s Masterpiece” piano solo from BioShock (which, as Brick noted, is never actually completed in-game) and a thoughtful translation of Portal 2‘s chiptune-sounding beats into a proper symphonic medley.

I will say, however, that there were no songs from Japanese games. Given that Japan’s contributions to the medium are so massive, the complete lack of music from any of the country’s games is felt throughout. I suspect licencing would have been tricky for some of the bigger titles, especially for the likes of Final Fantasy and Sonic the Hedgehog, which already have their own concerts, but it’s still disappointing that not even one Japanese game was featured.

The structure of the show was a bit odd, as well. Originally, it was to end on Jeremy Soule’s main theme from Skyrim, a majestic and thrilling piece that would be a perfect way to bring it all home. (They even brought out a full choir and it was simply amazing.) However, some encores led to us concluding on a decidedly somber and low-energy Destiny 2 piece. Even if I cared for this game (and I really don’t), I still would have preferred a grand finale akin to the Skyrim performance.

On the whole, though, Brick and the TSO put on a thoroughly entertaining show that featured an eclectic mix of games and corresponding types of music. We often don’t get a lot of video game events of any kind in Canada, so it’s great to see a quality show like Game On! make its way here. Here’s hoping we get an encore show that brings an even wider assortment of incredible video game music down the line.

The next Canadian Game On! performance will take place next June in Vancouver.

Body image credit: Andy Brick Music LLC.

We’ve talked a lot about the new iPad Pro this year, but after spending two weeks with the iPad Air (M2), I’m struggling to come up with any complaints about the Air. Sure, it’s not as perfect as the Pro, but it’s thin, powerful, has a nice screen, loud speakers and comes in fun colours. What else I can ask for from an iPad?

If the M2 Air came out any other year, it would basically be a Pro, but since Apple moved the goalposts with the M4 Pro, this model is an Air instead. While it may not have the same microLED backlight tech that was in the M2 Pro, side-by-side, it’s really hard to tell the two displays apart and in isolation, you’ll be hard-pressed to complain about either one. In case you’re missing what I’m putting down, the M2 iPad Air is phenomenal, and if you plan to use an iPad as your main machine for work, I think the Air is a great choice.

This year it comes with a 13-inch screen option, support for the Apple Pencil Pro, and while the price has increased $50, the base storage options now start at 128GB instead of a measly 64GB. While Apple might not have updated it as much as the Pro, the Air is still the iPad that most people should want.

How I’ve used it

During my two weeks using the Air it’s been both my main machine for work and play. I’ve used it to write a ton of MobileSryup stories, edit lots of photos, and I even used the files app to organize a lot of my retro games onto an external SSD. Not to mention watching TV before bed and playing games with the Delta emulator.

I should clarify that I’ve been testing out the new larger 13-inch model. This isn’t my first time with a 13-inch iPad. In 2022 I started using a 13-inch M2 iPad Pro and while I appreciate the larger screen when watching movies and working, it does detract from the portability a little bit, especially when you combine it with the first-generation Magic Keyboard. With it attached, you’re basically using a laptop with very little of the portability gains you’d want from a tablet. Obviously, you can take the tablet off the keyboard, and it becomes much more user-friendly, but it’s still a large tablet at the end of the day, so it’s not the best for curling up on the couch with.

If you really feel like you want the larger iPad, there is something to be said about the thinner Pro model since it just feels effortless to tote around in a way the big Air doesn’t quite achieve. While the 38-gram weight difference might not sound like a lot on paper, the new Pro manages to feel smaller even though it’s not.

For movies, the screen is awesome, and the speakers are loud and very clear. The display doesn’t have the unbelievable contrast or minimal ghosting of an OLED, but it’s still super clear and very colour accurate. Watching 4K movies is a great experience on this screen and the backlight control is quite strong with minimal light bleed. It reaches a peak brightness of 600 nits on the 13-inch model and 500 nits on the 11-inch, but in my testing with the larger iPad Air, the brightness was more than enough for everything except direct sunlight. You can still see the screen, it’s not a total washout, but next to a modern iPhone display, it is noticeably dimmer.

That said, I did bring my 10th generation iPad with a 500-nit brightness screen on my camping trip last summer and I used it outdoors for a week while watching TV in the sun. It wasn’t a perfect experience, but it worked and I was able to watch some of The Sopranos outdoors, which proves that you can still use a 500-nit screen outside, it’s just not perfect.

Is this the iPad for you?

Taking the 10th Gen iPad camping also opened my eyes to how good all iPads are. We can often get swept up in marketing hype since it’s easy to see new upgrades of the newest products, but it’s important to remember that Apple has been honing down the iPad experience for years, and since 2022, you haven’t been able to buy a mediocre iPad.

This year is no different. There isn’t a bad iPad on Apple’s shelves, and while you can look at the Air next to the Pro and think that it’s not cutting edge, in reality, the Air is a very thin slab of glass running modern iPadOS with an M2 chip. It’s an incredibly awesome tablet or even a computer replacement, and ideally, it will last for years and years to come since it has a desktop-class chip. Plus, in daily use, there is very little separating it from the Pro.

If I was buying an iPad as my main computer today I’d look to the Air. It has more than enough power, a great screen and a much more affordable price tag, especially if you want the large version. If you want an iPad just for media and web browsing, then even the 10th-gen is a great option. If you’re a die hard for top-of-the-line specs, then get the Pro. However, the experience between the Pro and the Air this year is pretty negligible day-to-day unless you really love the contrast ratio of OLED screens.

Either way, as long as you get an Air or Pro you won’t regret either one. The iPad Air comes in two sizes. The smaller 11-inch starts at $799 and the 13-inch at $1,099.

Over the years, I’ve upgraded to nicer displays and faster SD cards, leaving my old dongles in the dust. However, I’ve been testing a new  8-in-1 option from Dockcase, and it feels limitless.

The Dockcase Studio costs $218 CAD and is focused on creative professionals since it has support for CFexpress cards (type A and type B) and modern UHS-II SD cards. It also works with microSD cards, but the inclusion of two types of CFexpress slots makes this a device for high-end camera nerds.

Beyond that, there are three USB-C ports of varying specs, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a single USB-A. There’s also a small screen to track how fast your data is moving or how much power is coming in. The main USB-C port is labelled ‘Host,’ and it’s for plugging into your computer with the included USB-C cable (40Gbps/100-watt PD). The USB-C jack on the SD card side is labelled PD for power delivery. This port technically supports 100 watts of power, but since the device itself needs some wattage, Dockcase says that most devices will get a peak of around 95 watts. The final USB-C and the single USB-A are both rated at USB 3.2 specs with 10Gbps of data pass.

That all being said, all you need to know is that as long as you’re using fast cables, this dock won’t slow your workflow down very much.

How I’ve used it

Lately, I’ve been using an iPad Pro as my main work machine and having something like the Dockcase is incredibly helpful. While at first, I thought I would want a selection of smaller single-use adapters to work with the iPad, I quickly learned that’s too convoluted. Then I switched to the Dockcase Studio and I’ve been a lot happier just having one device I can rely on. Not to mention, having a UHS-II reader on an iPad makes moving photos from my camera so much faster than my old standard SD card adapter.

Overall, I have very few complaints about the dongle. It’s pocketable, fast, and supports all the major interfaces I need at high speeds. That said, I do wish it had incorporated a fast USB-C cable into the hardware design. Don’t get me wrong; it comes with a short 40Gbps/100-watt power cable, but there’s no place to store it on the device.

My previous dongle was a USB-C multiport adapter from Logiix which hid the cable in the device when not in use. I’ve had that adapter for years at this point, and I’ve never misplaced that cable. With the dockcase option, I find myself accidentally leaving the cable behind or needing to dig through all my other cables to find it. Overall, it’s a small thing, but for $218, it would be nice to see a little more thought go into the product design since you need a fast cable to get the most out of this product.

When it comes to the screen on the device, I could take it or leave it. The nerdy side of me loves to look at it and take in all the specs my devices are using, but 95% of the time I never look at it. Realistically, if Dockcase sold the same specs in a cheaper package without the screen, I think that’s the one I would go for.

If you want to buy the dongle yourself, it’s currently selling on Kickstarter for $218. 

Sonos has finally released a pair of high-end headphones, and I’m obsessed with how comfortable they are. They also look awesome, and obviously, being a Sonos product, they sound fantastic. Hell, I’ve already sold two people I know on getting them instead of AirPods Max, and I’ll continue to wax on (poetically) about them in this review. But there’s something that just doesn’t sit right with me about them.

In my eyes, Sonos was magic. The attention to detail on its products was right up there with Apple, and the sound that came out of the Sonos One family of speakers really shifted the paradigm of how much sound you could pack into a smart speaker. Then, the company conquered the living room with its excellent soundbars and wireless connection technology. The only place left was portable audio.

However, as Sonos has moved from a niche smart home speaker company to one of the world’s biggest speaker companies, it’s had to make a lot of compromises on the way, and it’s also had to learn a lot about what makes a good speaker.

Now, here we are. Five years after the launch of Sonos’ first Bluetooth speaker, the company finally feels ready to realize its dreams of making wireless headphones. However, a lot has changed in the headphone space since the pandemic, and people are asking more from them than ever before. And with how few software features are packed inside the Sonos Ace, it’s hard to tell if they have enough to take a piece of the pie Sony, Apple, and Bose have been sharing.

Welcome to headphone city

Pulling your Sonos Ace out of the box, you’re greeted with a premium experience that first reveals the case that comes with these headphones. It’s made of recycled materials that feel like a hefty form of felt. It reminds me a lot of Microsoft’s Surface devices’ Alcantara material. When you open it up, the inside is the same fabric but an offset colour. The headphones don’t fold up, but you do need to collapse the arms to fit in the case. In the centre there’s a small oval pouch magnetized in place to hold a charging cable and a USB-C to AUX cable.

At face value, I love this case. It looks really nice, and the soft mint interior is bringing me back with its nostalgic vibes. That said, the fact that it’s a coarse white fabric means it’s likely going to pick up dirt really fast. Even lint from your bag can get trapped in the fibres. Beyond that, the zipper, while very minimal, jams all the time. So far I’ve been able to wiggle it free every time, but with expensive headphones, you want a case that’s built to last.

The excellent design of the case carries over to the headphones. Both plastic earcups are minimal, with slender silver vents on the top and bottom. The right ear has a single power/Bluetooth button on the bottom, and the left ear has the ‘Content Key’ and a button to swap between active noise-cancelling (ANC), and Sonos’ transparency mode. The Content Key is really good, and it’s easily up there with Apple’s Digital Crown for easy and reactive headphone controls. Just being able to control the volume with precision with the Content Key makes it a big upgrade over Bose’s button-heavy earcups and Sony’s annoying touch panels.

The earcups and the soft cushion on the headband are made of matching vegan leather over memory foam which gives them a comfy, but secure feeling on your head. The small metal arms remind me of the classiness of the AirPods Max, but without all the extra weight of the metal earpieces. Overall, the Ace have an understated look, that’s more elegant than other plastic options from competitors like Sony and Bose. I would argue that the Bose 700s also carry a stylish elegance with them, but in my opinion, the Sonos are much nicer looking, and comfier, which is half the battle with over-ear headphones.

One trick pony… for now at least

Sonos has been in hot water recently because it rushed out a new app with several missing features. The working theory, at least online, is that the app needed to be out in time for the Ace launch. That said, the Ace are out, and just like the app, they’re missing a few features.

Sonos says, it’s working on it, and it has made good on re-adding some old features back into the rushed app, so the missing Ace features will likely appear at some point.

Realistically, I would have loved for Sonos to slow this down and launch both products when they were ready, but hey, what are shareholders good for if they’re not putting undo pressure on the workforce and dropping down arbitrary deadlines?

All of this is a long way to say that the Sonos Ace only have one really special software feature at launch. It’s called ‘TV Audio Swap,’ and right now, it only works with the Sonos Arc soundbar. The company says it is bringing the feature to its other soundbars, but not having the main selling feature of headphones working 100 percent at launch isn’t a great look. The Arc is Sonos’s best and most expensive soundbar ($1,099), but notably, both the Beam 2 and the Sonos Ray soundbars are newer than the Arc, so they should have the same tech inside. It makes it all the more puzzling that this feature only works on the Arc (for now).

When testing this feature with the Arc, it worked well with no noticeable audio lag. In my experience, this is likely the only way to use the Sonos Ace with a TV. Regular Bluetooth to my Apple TV 4K, or living room PC was unusable with lots of dropouts and lag. Even when it rolls out to all Sonos soundbars, I still think it’s going to be a tough sell. Especially when an Apple TV with AirPods or a Roku with a headphone jack are both more affordable options for listening to your TV quietly. Sonos can emulate surround sound in the headphones, and it’s pretty great for movies. Plus, since it works via your soundbar, it does allow you to game and use headphones with all your TV’s inputs. The Apple and Roku options I mentioned only work when you’re watching content on those devices. That said, you can pair two sets of AirPods to an Apple TV, which is handy for when two people need to watch something quietly.

Thet soundbar-based nature of these headphones makes them seem really primed for gaming, and they work great for single-player games, but you need to connect them to your controller with a wire if you want to use the microphone on them while gaming.

The other interesting software feature packed in the Ace is support for Spatial Audio, but like most non-Apple headphones, it doesn’t work very seamlessly. Don’t get me wrong it sounds awesome, but to make music play in Spatial, you need to lock your Apple Music app to be only Spatial. With AirPods, the headphones are smart enough to know if a song supports spatial, and they’ll switch to that format automatically. This lets you listen to a vast majority of music, which was recorded in stereo or mono, as it was intended. It’s a small thing, but I expect a lot of Sonos customers are semi-audiophiles, so be warned that you’ll be unable to change music formats on the fly.

To make this feature feel more immersive, Sonos has added head tracking to the Ace, but in my experience, it’s hit-and-miss. Sometimes, it’s subtle and works nice, but other times if I get up and move, the music locks to one ear and I’ll need to pause/play quickly to get it to centre again. You can disable this feature if you find it annoying, which is what I did.

Beyond all that, I could go into how I find the new app confusing to use, but I think in time I’ll learn it. The other thing I want to mention is the ANC. While it’s good, it’s not perfect and without music playing, I can still hear sounds from my girlfriend’s computer if we’re in the same room. Even as I was writing this, she finished something, let out a huge sigh, and I was able to hear it clearly with ANC on. Most of the annoying sounds are blocked out, but compared to the AirPods Pro that I use all the time, it doesn’t block out as much. The transparency mode is also fine, but not as good as on AirPods Pro, and there is no adaptive mode that can adjust ANC based on my surroundings – a feature I’ve had turned on for my AirPods Pros since it launched.

This year at WWDC I was finally able to go hands-on with the Apple Vision Pro, and it’s safe to say it was one of the most mind-bending tech experiences I’ve ever had. It was all I could think about for at least 30 minutes after my demo – I honestly kept chuckling quietly as my mind worked to comprehend how insane Apple’s virtual headset is.

When I first put on the Vision Pro, I was greeted by a dark screen with a few glyphs and instructions to help my eyes focus. Then, after two more setup steps, boom, you’re back in the real world, but now there’s a grid of icons floating in front of you. It’s a smart entry to the system and reminds me of the welcoming feel of a well-designed home – a small entryway leading to a grand reveal.

After taking in the floating grid, my eyes were drawn to the device’s flaws, at least when compared to regular human vision. The slight chromatic aberration at the far edges of the display, the pass-through applying typical Apple photo smoothing to people’s skin, and some light leaking from around my face all shocked me for a few seconds. I’d heard so much about the magic of the Vision Pro, so it was weird to see actual hardware limitations. However, within a few minutes (and for the rest of my 40-minute demonstration), I never noticed those things again. Once I started using the software, there was no turning back.

For most of my time, I found myself looking forward and moving my head to glance around. I didn’t do this on purpose; moving around that way just made sense. Because of this, I stopped noticing the slight aberrations since I rarely looked at the extreme edges of the display and instead just focused on what was in my main field of view. This focus on looking ahead also made the light leak less noticeable, and over time, I just got used to the camera as well.

These are such small things tech issues in a Gen-1 product that I have no fear that Apple will improve them over time, and honestly, it doesn’t matter that much since the current hardware and software are already exceptional.

There have only been two other times in my life when tech has tricked my brain. Once, when playing Flight Simulator in VR, I saw the sun pan across my plane’s dashboard, and I swear I could feel the heat on the back of my neck. The next time I was tricked by tech was during a Project Starline demo at Google I/O. Starline was so realistic and immersive that when the person leading the demo tried to make me take a ball from his hand, I reached out and grabbed for it only to get a fistful of air.

What I got excited about

The first thing that blew me away was the Apple immersive environment I was in. For years, I’ve thought my dream job would be to shoot the drone footage for the Apple TV screensavers, but I’m starting to think that making the Vision Pro Immersive Environments might be even more fun.

The space I demoed was a mountain top in Haleakala National Park at sunset, and it looked incredible. The light coming through the clouds was stunning, and the detail of the rocks at my feet looked perfect. I was only able to test out one environment, but if they’re all as detailed as the mountain I saw, I can’t wait to look around them.

The other thing that’s impossible to really explain without trying the headset yourself is the scale it provides. Blowing up a window to its maximum size is insane. Again, as someone who was late to testing out the headset, I’d heard all about the scale of it, but I never considered it to be as exciting as it was. I got to play an iPad racing game on a giant screen, and it was just cool. It wasn’t’ fully immersive like VR games, but the giant window meant that my whole field of view was taken up by one screen. Which at the end of the day, felt extremely immersive once I started focusing on the race.

Beyond that, I also got to make a slideshow in Keynote, which was a good way to learn the various controls and gestures of the headset. However, when I finished laying out my slide I was able to go into a mode meant to practice your presentation in. Once I clicked that button, I was no longer able to see my real environment, and instead, the headset transported me to a stage so I could feel what it might be like to present. Then, to make it even cooler, when I looked over my back shoulder, my presentation was towering over me, just like it would be at a real event. This was a pretty menial task, but the feeling of immersion it created was extraordinary.

The final thing that blew me away was Apple’s new Immersive videos. There are various events, sports, animals or music venues filmed with a special camera that allows Vision Pro wearers to look around the environment. This is a skill VR headsets have had for years, but Apple showed me a small snippet of an Alicia Keys studio session, and it was breathtaking. Suddenly, this superstar was singing right in front of my eyes, and the Vision Pro speakers’ sound made me feel like I was right there with her. I’m not even joking, but as soon as I picked my jaw off the floor, I cranked the volume, and it didn’t disappoint.

Coming to Canada soon

While I left my initial demo giddy and excited, I do wonder what using the device daily will be like? Will it be heavy? Will it be fun to use if none of my friends have one? Is it really a better movie experience than the projector I have at home?

The device is in a pre-release stage in Canada right now and will remain in that holding pattern until it goes up for pre-orders on Friday, June 28th at 5am PT/8am ET. The Vision Pro will then become available on July 12th. In the box, buyers can expect both the Dual Loop Band and the Solo Band, a personalized light seal with two cushions, a cover for the headset, a polishing cloth, the battery, a USB-C charging cable and a USB-C power adapter.

The 256GB option starts at $4,999. The 512GB option starts at $5,299, and the top-end 1TB model is $5,599. You can shop for the Vision Pro here.

Laptops sporting Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips are finally available starting June 18th after months of waiting. Unfortunately, I haven’t had as much time to test out the X Elite as I’d like, but I wanted to get some early impressions up for the embargo lift while I continue putting the chip through its paces. And my initial thoughts? X Elite is good, but I don’t think it lives up to the hype.

First, let’s run through what I’m using. Asus sent me a Vivobook S 15 to test out, which so far has been my only experience with the X Elite. I’m definitely curious to see how it fares in other devices, especially since Asus told me it cranked the CPU to 45W, more than other manufacturers did. The Vivobook S 15 I tried also had 16GB of RAM. That’s about all I need to say about Vivobook specs for now, but definitely stay tuned to learn more when my full Vivobook S 15 review drops in the coming weeks.

The other caveats I need to get out of the way are that I’ve spent less than a week with the Vivobook S 15 and that I decided not to do any specific benchmarking because the laptop is running an older version of Windows as the latest update drops on June 18th as well, the day my embargo lifts. There shouldn’t be any significant differences between the current software and the new update, so I’m comfortable sharing these initial impressions, but I decided it was best to delay my more rigorous testing. Plus, I was waiting to see what impact Recall might have, but that’s no longer dropping with the June 18th update.

Battery life a mixed bag…

My initial experience with the X Elite was fairly disappointing since it didn’t live up to the battery life promises made by Qualcomm, Microsoft and others. I was able to burn through about 70 percent battery life in roughly four hours, which frankly isn’t much better (and in some cases, worse) than x86 chips I’ve tried from Intel and AMD. However, after fiddling with some settings, the battery life improved significantly.

Notably, the only two things I changed were switching the laptop’s display from 120Hz to 60Hz (120Hz was on by default), and I didn’t connect the laptop to a secondary display. I almost exclusively use a second display when I work, so the first few days I was testing the battery, I had an external display connected. With no external display and the laptop’s built-in screen locked to 60Hz, the laptop lasted about seven hours to burn through the same 70 percent battery. I decided to plug it in there, but with the battery saver on, you could probably get another two or three hours more. I suspect the 120Hz display is more of a culprit than the external display, given that on days when I used the laptop on my commute into the office, I still had disappointing battery life despite not connecting a monitor.

While it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that you need to disable some power-hungry features to improve battery life, I was a bit disappointed I could enjoy the higher refresh-rate display. Perhaps a variable rate display would be better. Regardless, I’m willing to trade 120Hz for the much-improved battery life at 60Hz, though I’ll need to do more testing.

… but performance is solid

Moving onto performance, it’s worth noting that I ran the Vivobook S 15 in Windows’ ‘Best power efficiency’ setting, something I almost never did with x86 machines since the tradeoff resulted in very poor performance across the board. However, with the X Elite, I noticed virtually no difference between ‘Best power efficiency’ on battery and ‘Best performance’ when plugged in, a testament to the power efficiency of the X Elite compared to x86 chips. Moreover, all this happened without the Vivobook S 15 getting uncomfortably hot. Under heavy loads, it definitely warmed up, but it never got as hot as other Windows laptops I’ve tried.

Speaking of performance, I also encountered no significant issues with apps. I’m not sure how much of this comes down to increased support for ARM chips versus the X Elite just being significantly better than Qualcomm’s previous hardware. Most of my testing so far used the ARM version of Microsoft Edge and Photoshop, both of which worked great with no issues.

Surprisingly, the only app that did give me a bit of trouble was Slack, which had a weird input delay that would see the app take one or two seconds to show what I was typing or to send a message. The app was usable, but the delay became very irritating. The Windows Store indicated that Slack was compatible with my system but I suspect it didn’t actually download the ARM version of the app since when I manually downloaded it from the Slack website, it worked fine. Slack’s ARM app only just came out in beta recently, so perhaps that’s why the Windows Store version was so janky.

Ultimately, my early impressions of the X Elite are mostly positive. Battery life is a small improvement over x86 chips, though how much depends on what features you choose to run or disable. On the other hand, performance is pretty good and, so far in my testing, comparable to x86 chips with minimal issues. That said, users should expect a few kinks from Windows on ARM since it seems Microsoft hasn’t yet worked everything out. There’s still obviously lots of testing to do, but it looks like the X Elite will finally breathe some life into Windows on ARM and bring much-needed improvements to battery life to Windows laptops. It’s not quite the home run that was advertised, but it’s a definite improvement.

Stay tuned to MobileSyrup in the coming weeks for reviews of the Vivobook S 15 as well as other Copilot+PC devices from HP, Microsoft and more.