Today, Tuesday, June 18, 2024, the first notebooks with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus ARM processors became orderable, including systems from Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft. Specific examples of these first-generation systems are the Dell Latitude 7455, the Lenovo ThinkPad 14s Gen 6, and the Microsoft Surface Pro 11th Edition; many more will follow over the next year.
These Snapdragon X-based systems are the first notebooks that meet Microsoft's Copilot+ PC specification, which indicates a significant ability to perform onboard machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and generative AI functions. In addition, these Qualcomm systems promise notably superior battery life compared with comparable current Windows systems with Intel and AMD processors.
Challenges Regarding Microsoft Recall
Though these systems are technically interesting as far as hardware is concerned, it's the operating system software that ships with them that should directly concern University constituents. After much controversy, these systems will not initially ship with Microsoft Recall, as had been originally planned.
Despite the delay in availability, there are ongoing important considerations about Microsoft Recall for the Penn community. Microsoft Recall is a tool designed to assist with finding items from past use and is available only for Copilot+ PCs. Recall introduces substantial and unacceptable security, legality, and privacy considerations.
ISC will be disabling the use of Microsoft Recall via an enforced Group Policy Object (GPO) on compatible managed systems affiliated with KITE, and strongly suggests that administrators of other Windows environments at Penn disable Recall as well. Microsoft's instructions for disabling Recall in a managed environment are here.
University constituents with unmanaged or individually-owned systems should not use Microsoft Recall. ISC will publish instructions on disabling or removing Recall on these systems as soon as possible.
Support Prospects
Previous versions of Windows for ARM-based systems have not been supportable for general use at the University. When last comprehensively tested in early 2023, most remaining blockers to adoption were related to essential middleware such as BigFix and CrowdStrike. ISC believes that this new Windows version (likely designated 24H2) is substantially improved for ARM-based systems, but careful and Penn-centric testing is required. In the meantime, ISC recommends holding off on purchasing these newly released devices. If and when this version of Windows for ARM is judged supportable, configuration advice for these Snapdragon-based systems will be added to the Notebook Purchasing Guide.