Microsoft has been trying to make Windows-on-Arm-processors a thing for so long that, at some point, I think I just started assuming it was never actually going to happen.
The first effort was Windows RT, which managed to run well enough on the piddly Arm hardware available at the time but came with a perplexing new interface and couldn't run any apps designed for regular Intel- and AMD-based Windows PCs. Windows RT failed, partly because a version of Windows that couldn't run Windows apps and didn't use a familiar Windows interface was ignoring two big reasons why people keep using Windows.
Windows-on-Arm came back in the late 2010s, with better performance and a translation layer for 32-bit Intel apps in tow. This version of Windows, confined mostly to oddball Surface hardware and a handful of barely promoted models from the big PC OEMs, has quietly percolated for years. It has improved slowly and gradually, as have the Qualcomm processors that have powered these devices.
That brings us to this year's flagship Microsoft Surface hardware: the 7th-edition Surface Laptop and the 11th-edition Surface Pro.
These devices are Microsoft's first mainstream, flagship Surface devices to use Arm chips, whereas previous efforts have been side projects or non-default variants. Both hardware and software have improved enough that I finally feel I could recommend a Windows-on-Arm device to a lot of people without having to preface it with a bunch of exceptions.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has chosen to launch this impressive and capable Arm hardware and improved software alongside a bunch of generative AI features, including the Recall screen recorder, a feature that became so radioactively unpopular so quickly that Microsoft was forced to delay it to address major security problems (and perception problems stemming from the security problems).