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Here at Ars, we’ve been around long enough to chronicle every time Microsoft tried to get Windows to run on Arm-based processors instead of the Intel- and AMD-made x86 chips that have been synonymous with Windows for more than three decades. The most significant attempts occurred in 2012 with Windows RT, which looked like Windows 8 but could not run any x86 Windows applications; and in 2017, when Windows 10 Arm PCs arrived with rudimentary x86 emulation.

The main PC company behind each of these Arm efforts was Microsoft itself, which released the original Surface to showcase Windows RT and the first Surface Pro X during the Windows 10 era. Since then, Microsoft has periodically updated the Arm version of the Surface tablet, with while continuing to sell Intel versions. Several PC OEMs have released Windows RT tablets, and most of them have slapped an Arm PC or two with Windows 10-on-11. But there’s never been a big, unified push to make it clear that the entire consumer computing ecosystem has bought into Arm.

This week’s announcements seemed different—yes, there was a new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop from Microsoft leading the way (and the new Surface Pro is the first Surface Pro ever to ship Arm as the default option for most people). But the Surface launch was accompanied by a big wave of systems from nearly every major PC OEM, suggesting at least some level of heightened enthusiasm for the Snapdragon X series that didn’t exist for the older Arm chips.

From Lenovo, you have the Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, variants of the company’s main consumer and business laptops. Dell is offering a version of its flagship XPS 13 laptop, plus a pair of laptops in each of its Inspiron and Latitude families. HP has a business-class consumer OmniBook and EliteBook, and has taken the opportunity to completely overhaul its entire laptop lineup to boot. Acer has the Swift 14 AI; Asus has the Vivobook S 15; Samsung has the Galaxy Book4 Edge.

By comparison, a total of four non-Surface devices launched with the first wave of Windows RT, and Samsung’s didn’t even launch in the US. By the spring of 2013, Acer’s CEO was saying there was “no value” to Windows RT. Qualcomm had a total of three launch partners for the first wave of Snapdragon 835 PCs to launch with Windows 10 in late 2017. Each of those companies released one laptop (anyone who bought those systems would be saddled with four years later than Windows 11 supported processor list which does not support 835).

It may be that all of these companies’ enthusiasm is actually about the “Copilot+ PC” label, which denotes a Windows PC with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) fast enough to power Recall snapshots and other so-called ” next generation experiences’. Everyone is trying to cash in on the AI ​​boom, and for the next few months at least, these Arm-based Snapdragon PCs are the only ones that will be able to earn that label while Intel and AMD play catch-up. The upside of tying the two together is that Windows-on-Arm could rise alongside Copilot+ if it succeeds; the risk is the lack of user interest in Copilot+ or Snapdragon chips can fail both initiatives.

But whatever the reason, the big wave of hardware from all PC OEMs is another thing that makes this particular push of Arm Windows feel different from previous ones. The others, as we’ve written elsewhere, have better app compatibility, a greater selection of native apps, and chips that claim to be unequivocally better than what Intel and AMD make, though we’ll have to more testing before we know if the expected improvements in performance and battery life show up in real life.

In the past, you kind of had to go out of your way to find and buy a Windows PC that happened to have an Arm chip in it, and you’d probably notice that it didn’t do some of the same things as a “normal” PC. This flurry of Arm announcements is a preview of what the future of Windows might look like—a broad mix of hardware using multiple chips and multiple instruction sets from multiple companies, but all of which is essentially hidden from most users of a familiar operating system. and applications.