Episode 89 - We review Microsoft's Surface Copilot Plus PCs

Solid State Podcast

I’ve unboxed a lot of gadgets through the years… maybe too many? Okay, that’s a lie, and one of them I sincerely will never forget was shockingly almost 12 years ago when a box arrived on my desk from Microsoft that contained, in their minds at least, the next-big-thing in Personal Computing…

See, just a couple years prior, a certain company in Cupertino changed the landscape with the announcement of a slab of metal and glass that ran apps, had a decent(ish) web browser, and a battery that lasted seemingly forever. In all honesty, they couldn’t actually do all that much compared to even a run-of-the-mill laptop of the day, but there was still something there. Something new, special.

Microsoft, of course, had to have a response to in the Fall of 2012 Surface was born. Now, because it is Microsoft after all, it couldn’t be a total reimagining of what a computer does because, well, a lot of people use PCs and they expect their software to run even if it was last updated during the Clinton administration…

So what made the box that arrived that day special was that this was, even for Microsoft, something different. This particular “Surface” device, as it was called, was the “RT” model… a name almost as confusing as the device itself. It ran Windows… kind of. It could run many of the applications I needed… sort of. And the performance should be top notch… occasionally. Because beating at the heart of this “RT” model was an ARM based processor unlike any seen in a Microsoft device before, the same core type running in Apple’s now-wildly-popular iPad.

Sadly what we did get was a hot, slow, incompatible device, but one that still represented the beginning of a journey, that so far has now led to the launch of Copilot Plus PCs, a series of both first and third party offerings in Microsoft’s latest Windows-on-ARM attempt. Battery life? Check. Compatibility? Pretty darn good. Performance? Oh yeah…

It was a long road to get here from that ill-conceived paperweight in 2012, but man, this is getting interesting…