Good news! Most apps I’ve tried on Microsoft’s Copilot+ Surface just work
Have you been burned before by Windows on Arm? Are you worried whether the apps you need will actually run on Copilot+ PCs? I was, too. But after playing around with one myself, I’m fairly optimistic that those days are over, as Qualcomm executives promised.
After receiving a Surface Pro (2024) 11th Edition from Microsoft for review, I spent a good chunk of my first day just downloading various applications and seeing if they’d run—and if they did, how well.
I came away with three key conclusions:
First, this is indeed a productivity tablet, and Microsoft and Qualcomm have done a good job making sure most common productivity application work without hassle.
Second, Copilot+ PCs are not gaming PCs, and there’s a good chance your favorite games won’t even run.
Third, the type of app you run on the tablet matters in an absolutely enormous way. If you run an emulated app, especially on battery, expect battery life to drop considerably as the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip chews through the unoptimized code.
Here’s what I’ve found through my testing so far. This is not an absolutely exhaustive list! There may be apps that I haven’t tried out that hide issues or performance problems.
Browsers on Arm: Spoiled for choice
Most browsers are now available in Arm versions, so I didn’t expect much trouble running any of the popular ones. (The only major browser without a native Arm version is the latest Arc browser, which Arc won’t even let you download to a Copilot+ PC right now.)
Chrome, the most popular browser by user count, worked just fine browsing a number of rich media sites. My browser extensions—which are mainly ad-blocking—worked as well. I also tried Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera, and Brave to great results.
The only glitch I noticed was that Brave would crash when I tried to import settings from another browser.