Windows on Arm had another good year

In 2024, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips finally made Arm-based Windows laptops viable. Unlike previous Arm laptops that struggled to even run Windows well, this new class offered solid performance and the best battery life on Windows, and they impressed us in Microsoft’s own Surface Laptop and Surface Pro offerings. But inconsistent app compatibility remained the biggest hurdle to running Windows on Arm. (It forced me to use the watered-down Adobe Lightroom app instead of Lightroom Classic, and that’s a sin.) And playing games, one of Windows’ greatest strengths against the walled garden of Apple’s Macs, was basically a nonstarter.

Throughout 2025, a slow burn of software improvements have taken the situation from pretty good to much better. Some creative apps that were absent from Windows on Arm now have native versions or run with Prism emulation. Adobe Premiere Pro works natively. And I found that Lightroom Classic, compatible in emulation, works just fine for light edits, even on lower-end Snapdragon X Plus chips.

More games work too, thanks to emulator improvements supporting x86 Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and AVX2. Qualcomm even has a designated Snapdragon Control Panel for delivering prompt graphics driver updates, just like Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat, used by Fortnite and other games, now works on Windows on Arm. And the Xbox game launcher now supports local game installs on Arm instead of only offering cloud streaming.

At this point, I have no hesitation recommending a Windows on Arm laptop to friends and family as long as they don’t require specific software, like Ableton Live, that’s not yet compatible (and even Ableton is getting an Arm version in 2026). Or, if gaming is their highest priority and they’re better served by the Asus ROGs and Lenovo Legions of the world than a thin-and-light. In fact, I encouraged my sister to buy the 13-inch Surface Laptop while it was on sale for $550 during Black Friday. That’s such a good deal, and I’m confident it’ll be the quietest, most portable, most powerful, and longest-lasting laptop she’s owned yet.

Even if you’re not upgrading from a 10-year-old laptop, the first generation of Snapdragon X chips offer battery life and standby times that were once unheard of for Windows laptops, especially coming off of a few especially bad generations of Intel processors. However, Intel’s Lunar Lake and AMD’s Strix Point chips took some of the wind out of Qualcomm’s sails when they launched a few months after, with competitive performance and nearly as good battery life.

Intel and AMD showed that the x86 architecture still has fight left in it. And as hype builds for 2026’s face-off between Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2, Intel’s Panther Lake, and AMD’s rumored “Gorgon Point,” we could be in for an even fiercer battle than usual. It could get more heated if Nvidia enters the fray.

There are rumors and leaked benchmarks indicating Nvidia is working on a new Arm-based chip to debut in a not-yet-announced Alienware laptop — in addition to whatever it’s cooking up with Intel for x86. The combination of Nvidia and Alienware points to an Arm chip with a big focus on graphics, much like AMD’s excellent Strix Halo on the x86 side. The integrated GPUs we’ve seen so far on Snapdragon chips aren’t powerful enough to run modern games at high settings, and Arm chips don’t yet support discrete GPUs. An Arm chip with Nvidia graphics could be pretty compelling for gamers.

Windows on Arm had a good year. The gap between x86 and Arm Windows laptops is narrowing, and it’ll narrow further in 2026. Arm laptops are easier to recommend to more people, though x86 will still be the better choice for gaming for the foreseeable future.

2026 will bring fresh challenges: not just new Intel and AMD chips, but fiercer competition from Linux, which also had a very good year. As Microsoft transforms Windows into an “agentic OS,” stuffing it with more semifunctional AI bloat, it risks further pissing off users, who might find greener pastures elsewhere. Maybe the question in 2026 won’t be “Should you buy a Windows on Arm laptop?” but “Should you buy a Windows laptop at all?”