Daniel - great review. However, could you speak to the potential impact of Lunar Lake coming this fall? It seems to me that if Intel is even close to their efficiency claims, won’t this kill ARM? Why would users risk any incompatibilities, and why would developers use their limited resources, to support ARM in that instance?
Thanks, and sure!
I'm pretty bullish on Intel and have been for a few years once I understood their ambitious "Five nodes in four years."
I don't think LL will be as efficient as Oryon. I hear Oryon v2 (due next summer) is the first mobile Oryon chip, as the current one is based on Nuvia's original server chip design (Nuvia was initially founded to build ARM server chips, not laptop ones). I hear V2 will be a big deal, not a minor clock tweak.
That said, as I've talked about on the podcast, there are diminishing returns after what, 12 hours of battery life in a laptop (unless you go to something extreme like 72 hours), so I think Intel needs to get close enough to be still competitive.
I think Intel's risk is Qualcomm's undercutting them for pricing. As I note in the review, Pro 11 is $400 cheaper now with a 16GB/256GB SKU, and that goes up to the top-tier 32GB/1TB model. (Look at Pro 10 vs Pro 11; Pro 10 is the new Meteor Lake and is still more expensive). Indeed, ALL the new Snapdragon X chips are really competitively priced.
Dell has the XPS 13 with Intel and Qualcomm—the exact same laptop. For a while, you could get the XPS 13 with ARM 16/256 for $1,299, while the Intel model was only 8GB for the same price. They've now made that even, but Intel stepped down in price.
The one I worry about? AMD. They're not making a lot of headway into premium laptops. Dell's XPS line was exclusively Intel until Qualcomm came with Snapdragon X. AMD has never been in an XPS laptop (they technically did a GPU, once). And Microsoft booted AMD out of Surface because it wasn't good enough.