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Preface

My journey of choosing laptops began in 2014, when I bought my first computer as a new university student—a ThinkPad L14 (2014 model). In 2017, I switched to the Intel-based 16-inch MacBook Pro, and in 2021 I upgraded to the 14-inch M1 MacBook Pro, witnessing firsthand the dramatic shift brought by Apple’s transition to its own silicon.

In October 2024, during a government subsidy program, I purchased the ThinkPad T14p Gen 2 with the Ultra 9 integrated GPU. In May 2025, I added the MacBook Air 15-inch M4 to my lineup; and by October of the same year, I bought the Surface Pro 11 X Plus, officially beginning my exploration of the Windows-on-ARM experience. Over the past decade, my laptop choices have shifted with the changes in my studies, work, and lifestyle—they reflect not only my evolving professional needs, but also the broader transitions of computing platforms and industry trends.

The Strengths and Limitations of the Windows Ecosystem

The advantages of using Windows are obvious. First, the Office suite on Windows offers an unparalleled experience—its performance and compatibility are both impeccable. Second, expandability is virtually unlimited. Over the years, I’ve always kept a desktop alongside my laptops—from an early Intel Hades Canyon NUC, to a self-built i7-11700 mATX desktop, and later an HP workstation with an i7-12700. The persistent fan noise of the Hades Canyon under sustained load eventually drove me toward better-cooled self-built systems and workstations, whose thermal performance once gave me the illusion of “limitless performance.”

My main operating system has long been Windows 10, which has been stable for the past few years—I probably went one or two years without reinstalling it. Occasionally, I’d complain about Windows forcing updates and rebooting automatically, closing my browser and all work files. Other than that, the experience was generally good.

By comparison, the MacBook Pro has always been more of a “light-duty companion” in my usage—mostly for writing simple code, checking email, and reading PDFs. Heavy tasks like data analysis or running large professional software all took place on my x86 Windows desktop.

But recently, my lifestyle has changed. I’ve been traveling frequently, often living in different places for months at a time, without a stable workspace, and unwilling to stay indoors all day. I want to be able to work in different environments—cafés, on the road, anywhere. This created a new need: a high-performance Windows laptop that could recreate desktop-level productivity in a portable form. I had used Windows laptops back in university, but my strongest memory was wandering around the library looking for seats with available power outlets. Naively, I assumed that after ten years and leaps in chip manufacturing, we’d already have far better battery life and thermals. Reality proved otherwise.

When the government subsidy went live in October 2024, I barely hesitated before locking onto the ThinkPad T14p Gen 2. I didn’t look at lighter options like the X1 Carbon, nor did I consider high-TDP gaming laptops. I hardly play games anyway—what I truly needed was a machine that could complete code runs as quickly as possible. So I went straight for the Ultra 9 iGPU model. Another thing that drew me to the T14p was its near-perfect expandability: dual-channel RAM, dual M.2 slots. As for battery life, at the time I was doing a lot of writing, and saw many users casually saying, “It lasts the whole day.”

And I believed them. Back then, terms like power consumption, thermals, and performance limits didn’t mean much to me. I assumed that improvements in chip fabrication naturally translated to better user experience. I thought that the gap between Windows laptops and MacBooks might no longer be that wide. But reality soon hit me—hard. I eventually realized that Apple’s M-series laptops are a dimensionality-reducing strike against Windows+x86. It isn’t just a generational difference—it’s a fundamental one: power efficiency, battery life, standby behavior—every aspect feels like it’s separated by several eras.

Battery Life, Standby, and the Real-World Experience

Standby

When it comes to standby, the MacBook is almost perfect. Close the lid, and it can sleep quietly for days—sometimes even weeks. Open it again, and the battery is nearly untouched, the screen lights up instantly, and every app sits exactly where you left it.

And Windows laptops? When you pull one out of your backpack, it’s often warm. If you shut it down and reboot to the desktop, you’ll spend 15 to 20 seconds waiting for all the background processes to finish loading. Put it in your bag at 100%, take it out later to find only 30% left—and at best, you’ll squeeze out another half hour of use. I’ve experienced this scenario so many times that each recurrence feels like reliving the same nightmare.

The root cause lies in Microsoft’s attempt to introduce “Modern Standby” (S1 mode), hoping to give Windows laptops a smartphone-like “always on” experience. But the vision was rosy; the reality, painfully brittle. To remain compatible with the vast and messy x86 hardware ecosystem, this mechanism ended up being almost despairingly bad. And Windows 11’s automatic maintenance tasks—checking for updates, downloading patches, installing system updates you never asked for—routinely wake the system during standby. Sometimes a single update can break sleep entirely, especially when virtualization-related features like WSL2 are enabled.

Laptop manufacturers haven’t optimized S1 standby properly, nor have they invested resources to support the older S3 mode. Modern ThinkPads no longer support traditional S3 sleep. Which means the only reliable way to prevent your battery from being drained is… shutting down, or using hibernation, which is barely better than a reboot. But for me, “shutting down” feels downright inhumane. I keep dozens of Chrome tabs open, along with multiple editors and terminal windows. Being forced to close everything feels like being forced to shut down my entire train of thought.

I’ve been spoiled by the MacBook’s M-series. It trained me to expect near-perfect fluidity: close the lid and go; open the lid and continue. On that machine, work is continuous. On Windows, it is constantly interrupted.

The Opacity of Battery Life

The internet is filled with marketing-driven ads and vague, uninformative “battery life tests.” In review videos, the host might tell you with a straight face: “This laptop scored 8 hours of office battery life in PCMark10,” yet no one explains: How long does it actually last in day-to-day use? Will power-saving mode cause lag or frame drops? What’s the actual experience? Does dark mode really save power? The real details of battery life have never been seriously discussed.

Many reviewers test under unrealistic conditions—like playing a Bilibili video at minimum brightness. But processors are optimized specifically for video playback, so this tells you nothing about real office workloads. Others open a Word document and claim it lasts 10 hours. Those who boast “all-day battery life” on Xiaohongshu are usually light-duty users whose needs could be met by an iPad, a Chromebook, or even Samsung’s Dex mode. They are not users like me—nor am I the audience their tests speak to. I can’t help but think that HarmonyOS PCs, which emphasize light productivity, might actually represent the true mainstream of today’s laptop market.

To understand battery life better, I learned to track my own power usage constantly and analyze how my behavior affects consumption. I bought the T14p Ultra 9 version specifically for its 80W peak performance and stable 50W sustained performance.

But for battery life, I was forced to enable Best Power Efficiency mode—which caps power draw at around 20W. And then… everything slowed down. Text input lagged, window switching stuttered, even typing felt “sticky.” Whenever I worked outside, I constantly had to babysit Task Manager, manually killing background processes—Dropbox, OneDrive, Tailscale, LocalShare, PowerToys… clearing them one by one.

It’s an extremely anti-human experience. I finally understood why almost no one online recommends “Windows utility apps,” while Mac users love sharing menu-bar tools and background enhancers. On Windows, background apps are a burden; on macOS, they are effortless conveniences.

My daily workflow isn’t complicated, but it’s enough to stress battery life: dozens of Chrome tabs, music playing in the background; Word, Adobe Acrobat, Zotero, Notion, Outlook, VSCode/Cursor all open at once; Bluetooth earbuds and mouse connected; screen brightness at maximum (T14p peaks at 430 nits) because I often work in cafés or outdoors. In power-saving mode, the CPU is locked at around 2.0GHz, and this whole workflow averages 23.6W of power draw. That means: with a 75Wh battery, the T14p lasts only about 3 hours.

Switch to Balanced or Performance mode, and battery life drops below 2 hours—though performance becomes slightly smoother, at the cost of heat and fan noise. In performance mode, you also feel the heat, especially brutal in summer—the keyboard gets uncomfortably hot.

I rebuilt the exact same workflow on the MacBook Air M4 (15-inch). Power consumption fluctuates only between 3–6W, with more background apps and a smoother experience. I can summon any app instantly with Raycast; the system has virtually no latency. No fans, no noise—even under long hours, the palm rests remain cool. The M4’s performance is more than enough for my needs, and whether plugged in or on battery, the experience is almost identical. With its 66.5Wh Li-poly battery, the MacBook Air M4 delivers a real, fully usable 10-hour workday. Since I bought it, I’ve almost never managed to drain the battery completely.

For macOS, my workflow of webpages and documents is merely a light load—close the lid, let it sleep, open it again, and everything continues in one seamless flow. But in the Windows world, so-called “light office battery life” usually refers only to opening Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plus a handful of webpages—and only after shutting down many background processes. Once you enter a real multitasking environment, the system becomes sluggish and heavy.

When frequently switching between “open → lid-close sleep → open again,” the MacBook remains consistently smooth; meanwhile, a Windows laptop behaves as if it’s rebooting—often needing more than ten seconds to return to a usable state. Ever since I bought the T14p, I’ve had to quit apps, close webpages, and shut down entirely before closing the lid. This forced “adaptation” created a profound sense of fragmentation—what feels fluid and continuous on a Mac is chopped into pieces on Windows.

Portability, Input Experience, and Peripheral Dependence

As someone who goes to the gym year-round, I’m not sensitive to laptop weight—500 grams is just another bottle of water. But the real weight penalty of using a Windows laptop?

The 100W “brick” power supply. I have to carry it nearly every day. Yes, I could switch to a smaller 65W GaN charger—but the wattage isn’t enough. On loose café outlets, it often disconnects and falls to the floor. And even when plugged into a 65W charger, I still can’t use the T14p in “Best Performance Mode.”

A mouse—always. ThinkPad’s trackpad can’t compare to the MacBook’s precision. The cursor constantly drifts off target, the logic of single vs. double-click feels vague, and the buttons require too much force. Only the Surface Pro Flex keyboard cover has a trackpad that can somewhat match the MacBook’s. I still remember having this level of smooth trackpad experience as early as my 2017 MacBook Pro. I genuinely don’t understand why something that dramatically improves usability—like a high-quality, large-surface trackpad—is still not standard on Windows laptops approaching four-figure prices, leaving users stuck with outdated, cumbersome touchpad technology.

Another point that must be mentioned is heat in the keyboard area. As someone who spends more than 8 hours a day at a computer, with my hands on the keyboard for 5 to 6 hours, I’m extremely sensitive to typing feel. This should be an advantage of Windows laptops—especially ThinkPads, whose firm, confident key feedback used to be reassuring. But the T14p’s thermal issues completely ruined it. When I first bought it during autumn and winter, the heat didn’t bother me; but in summer, you can feel waves of heat rising from the keyboard. That burning sensation is stressful—and that’s not even mentioning the fan noise.

Conclusion

Through these months of use, I gradually realized that “wanting everything at once” is nearly impossible in a laptop. Even a seemingly perfect, highly expandable all-round machine like the T14p cannot escape terrible standby and battery life. Windows and Intel don’t seem capable of solving these long-standing issues anytime soon.

Even upgrading to workstation-class devices like the P16 Gen2 won’t avoid the same bottlenecks: power management, thermals, and noise. The MacBook lineup has its own flaws—its RAM and storage are priced like gold—but unlike Windows laptops, these flaws can be solved with money. Windows laptops have shortcomings that money simply cannot fix.

In the end, the compromise I found was a combination of “ITX desktop + thin-and-light laptop.” The ITX machine became the most realistic balance among performance, noise, and portability—a return from idealism to practicality.

So in August 2025, I purchased the ThinkStation P3 Ultra Gen2. This compact but powerful device fulfills nearly all my needs for portable, high-performance computing. I can fit it into a 20L suitcase, plug it in at a hotel, use it without an external monitor as if it were a server, and with Moonlight for remote streaming, I can finally enjoy a near-desktop-level work experience anywhere.

The Overlooked World of Windows on Arm (WOA) Laptops

The scorching keyboards of traditional laptops finally pushed me away for good. The irritation and discomfort of long typing sessions drove me to explore a different category of devices—2-in-1s. Among them, the Surface Pro series stood out immediately: no heat, detachable keyboard—two decisive advantages for someone like me. And as luck would have it, Amazon Prime Day rolled around, allowing me to pick up the much-criticized Qualcomm Snapdragon version of the Surface Pro 11 at an almost “impossible to refuse” price.

Some might ask: if I care so much about user experience, why not choose the more powerful Surface Pro Lunar Lake version? The answer is simple and pragmatic.

While I’m willing to pay extra for better usability, the Lunar Lake model starts at a staggering $1,500—whereas the entry-level Qualcomm version costs just over $400. With a price gap this large, compatibility issues suddenly don’t seem all that insurmountable.

Most of my work revolves around writing in Office apps, browsing the web, and reading PDF files—all of which are native ARM applications with virtually zero compatibility concerns. And with Qualcomm’s CPU built on a 4nm process, the efficiency advantages at low-power workloads are unmistakable. Compared with raw performance, what I really wanted to experience was Qualcomm’s long-established expertise in power management as a mobile chip veteran.

To be frank, I’ve already lost confidence in the Intel platform. The way x86 processors transition between high-load and low-load states—especially instantaneous frequency adjustments—feels clumsy and sluggish, nowhere near the fine-grained power control of mobile processor makers. On top of that, Intel’s various power modes seem like crude frequency locks, and Windows 11 still hasn’t mastered the scheduling of Intel’s big cores, small cores, and “smaller” small cores. Even on Reddit, users who bought both the Lunar Lake and Snapdragon X Plus versions of the Surface Pro mentioned: “Windows 11 isn’t actually faster on Intel than on ARM; it just feels less smooth. Especially when opening or closing apps or pulling up the Start menu, the animations seem slightly choppy, like minor frame drops.”

I received the Surface Pro in early October, and I can finally rely on S0 Modern Standby without worrying that the device will heat up mysteriously in my bag or wake itself up for no reason. What surprised me most was its standby power draw—just 0.1 Wh.
In my daily workflow—web browsing, document editing, PDF annotation, background syncing—the system’s total power consumption stays at 6–8 W. Switching to Battery Saver mode brings it below 5 W, even with all background tasks still active. And the system remains smooth, with no obvious stutter or dropped frames.

I understand why Snapdragon CPUs have been widely criticized—weak performance, compatibility issues, inconsistent heat and power behavior, and the painfully long gap between announcement and actual availability. But to me, none of these are the real deal-breakers.

What truly discourages users is the pricing. If these laptops fell into the ¥4000–¥5000 range, people might judge them far more kindly. After all, once the price stops towering over expectations, users can finally appreciate the ARM platform’s strengths: cooler, quieter, more efficient computing.

Even if Lunar Lake manages to match Qualcomm in battery life, Intel’s x86 architecture still feels clumsy when it comes to fine-grained tuning. A genuinely great laptop experience has never been just about piling up performance numbers—it’s about balancing power consumption, noise, thermals, system responsiveness, and ecosystem maturity.

It’s worth mentioning that I haven’t run into any major compatibility issues so far. I even played several Steam games on this tablet—Detroit: Become Human, Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Escape from Tarkov, and a few visual novels. Meanwhile, reports suggest that Valve is actively working on an ARM-compatible layer (Proton on ARM), which naturally leads one to imagine future ARM-powered handheld gaming devices. Personally, I’m looking forward to the second-generation Snapdragon X series.

Let’s give it a little more time—Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, the ARM platform will truly shine on the stage of laptops and mobile computing.

Summary & Outlook

Ten years of buying and using laptops have taught me one thing: the perfect laptop simply doesn’t exist—not today. The key isn’t to hunt for a device that “does everything,” but to clearly understand what you truly need.

Laptop experience has never been just a hardware issue. If Windows cannot achieve deeper synergy with its hardware, its shortcomings in standby and battery life will never be fully resolved. For me, the most practical and efficient mobile-work setup remains the combination of an ITX desktop + an ultraportable laptop—balancing performance with mobility while adapting flexibly to different work scenarios.

At the same time, ARM laptops are showing undeniable long-term potential. With ultra-low standby power consumption and more refined frequency tuning, they promise an experience that is genuinely lightweight, quiet, and long-lasting. Compared with traditional x86 platforms, ARM seems to better understand the balance between power efficiency and user experience—and this may very well be the direction in which future laptops evolve.

As an ordinary consumer, I sincerely hope future battery-life reviews will reflect real-world usage rather than idealized tests like “video playback at minimum brightness.” What we need are evaluations that reveal true power consumption and minimum usable battery life under everyday workloads—for example, by continuously recording power draw with open-source tools like Traffic Monitor, presenting a transparent and verifiable picture of actual experience.

(This article was proofread with the help of ChatGPT, which also generated the cover image.)

Cover image by Sandor Nagy