Comments Locked

24 Comments

Back to Article

  • Valantar - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    In theory, this is an attractive laptop, but the pricing alone means I'd never consider it. Even if the performance improves enough to compete with, say, an i3 (which would be sufficient for basic home/office use), for the same money I could get an XPS 13 which would be faster and lighter. Sure, I'd lose the Yoga and pen functionality and 10 hours of (manufacturer spec) battery life, but 15-ish hours is still plenty. Get these down to the $600 range, and we're talking. Is Qualcomm really charging as much as Intel for these chips?
  • MananDedhia - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    I would definitely disagree that the steep price is due to the processor. This has a solid state drive. And the biggest one is the novelty factor. Once Windows, Qualcomm and other vendors are able to hammer out the kinks in the implementation, the market will be flooded with these things and prices will come down subsequently.
  • vanilla_gorilla - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    Other premium laptops are around this same price using i3 processors (e.g., Dell XPS 13 starts at $799 with an i3, 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD). The question is, are people willing to trade performance to get a massive increase in battery life and integrated LTE. If you use mostly web based applications I don't think the lack of software compatibility or x86 emulation overhead will be much of an issue.
  • Samus - Saturday, September 1, 2018 - link

    The Surface Go has an SSD, and can be equipped with 128GB and a keyboard for hundreds less than this thing.

    Let's be honest, too. Even the Pentium Gold is going to slaughter this thing in performance.
  • vanilla_gorilla - Saturday, September 1, 2018 - link

    The Surface Go only has a 10" display, no keyboard included, or an awful one you can buy, optional LTE ($$$) and only 9 hours of battery life. Add in a keyboard and a model with LTE, upgrade to the 128GB SSD (64GB base) and you're probably at $650 (guessing?) and still have a tiny display and less than half the battery life? I'd definitely take the Yoga over that.
  • sing_electric - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link

    You're pretty close; with the type cover the upper model surface is $680, and I'm not aware of there being an LTE version.

    At first, I was going to say that the comparison between the two isn't great, except I really think that the Surface Go's performance and 10" screen mean its more of a companion device (in other words, it can't be the only laptop you've got if you need it for work, or writing long papers in school), and I highly suspect that the performance of the Snapdragon 850 will put the Lenovo in the same category, especially since there will be times when there'll be an x86 app running in a pretty slow emulation layer.
  • ragenalien - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    I think it's less about the cost of the snapdragon chip and more about the other components. With intel stuff they already have boards tested and ready to go. They likely even have a very streamlined process for getting things tested and to market which makes it cheaper and it's already at a large scale. With these the scale is smaller, which makes every other part more expensive, they have to do more testing (likely) given that it's a completely new device, and they're likely just trying to see what the market will absorb with them.
  • eastcoast_pete - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    Agree on the price being too high. At ~$600, the price/value proposition would be more compelling. This is a bad pricing strategy: (over) charging at launch means low sales, which might bring down prices later due to large inventory, but by then, the novelty factor is gone. Charge a decent price at launch, and Lenovo would be much more likely to get the uptake they want. Lenovo, hit Qualcomm up for a discount (direct or a coupon for buyers), they want to get into the notebook/convertible space badly enough to take a hit up front.
  • sing_electric - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link

    I suspect the Snapdragon SoC isn't really driving the price here, and is probably competitive with a Pentium Gold (or maybe i3?) machine by the time you put in WiFi and LTE.

    The pricing, I'm betting, comes from Lenovo figuring that there's a certain segment of corporate customers who are willing to pay for the battery life, AND who see the ARM platform as a security feature, rather than a performance hamper.
  • randomhkkid - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    I wonder is the 26% IPC uplift will be enough to alleviate the sluggish-ness of the first generation. That said the 61Whr battery should lead to some monstrous battery life.
  • yeeeeman - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    Not worth more than 500 bucks given the fact that it competes with Pentium processors and it runs only a handful of x86 apps and those at reduced speeds.
  • yhselp - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    I hope the fact Microsoft hasn't released a Snapdragon Surface device, doesn't mean it considers the chips suboptimal for now, although it might.
  • eastcoast_pete - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    The surface lines are MS hardware flagships, so they went with tried&true Chipzilla processors to reduce the risk of teething problems, which Surfaces had several of as we know. They might re-evaluate for the next generation, after others have tested the waters. The 1000 series of Snapdragons might be of interest then, and is likely already being tested.
  • yhselp - Saturday, September 1, 2018 - link

    It'd be nice if they release a Snapdragon Surface Go; I imagine most people wouldn't use that 10" device as a fully-fledged computer, would never upgrade the Windows 10 S that comes with it, which is pretty much as limited as Windows 10 "Arm". They should be able to sell it for $300 as well, given how the current models retails for $400 and has a $160 Intel chip inside.

    So a Snapdragon Surface Go that pretty much does everything the current Intel model does, with the same speed, for $100 less sounds pretty good actually.
  • sing_electric - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link

    I think MS is being twice bitten, thrice shy after Surface RT.
  • dbdavis1990 - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    You are spot on.
  • digiguy - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    The truth about battery life is that you don't get more than half of what manufacturers announce if you use high brightness and multitask a lot. I use 75% to 100% brightness depending on the pc and for instance a surface pro 3 doesn't even get 4 hours with me. With an XPS 13 full hd I wouldn't be confident to not bring a charger to give a full day training (7 hours of power point plus browsing during the breaks plus trip on the train in the morning and on the way back in the evening). This might be the only pc I could confidently use all day and not worry about the charger, if performance is good enough (good enough for me is M3 with SSD and at least 8GB RAM).
  • timecop1818 - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    ... and literally nobody gave a shit.

    i run windows to use quality software, not the shit filling the wasteland that is the Microsoft app store.
  • baka_toroi - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link

    Could you install Linux on such a computer or is it bootloader locked?
  • zodiacfml - Saturday, September 1, 2018 - link

    I expected a price of $950 but still too damn expensive. This isn't even a 7nm chip. They should know better that most people aren't into PCs anymore and this is the perfect time to get more aggressive before Intel starts putting out decent stuff in 2020.

    Built-in LTE is nothing if I can set my phone as a hotspot.

    Additionally, can't they make this dual boot to Android? It appears that Qualcomm is motivated by Microsoft.
  • Piotrek54321 - Saturday, September 1, 2018 - link

    How does Windows work on this machine? It's it fully emulated x86, or is it just the Win32 programs that have some kind of sandboxed emulation and it's Windows on ARM?
  • timecop1818 - Saturday, September 1, 2018 - link

    UWP is native, win32 is emulated. OS itself is native.
  • SarahKerrigan - Saturday, September 1, 2018 - link

    Actually, you can compile native win32 apps too. A full SDK was released at BUILD.
  • Azurael - Sunday, September 2, 2018 - link

    Err, I'll stick to my Latitude 5175. It might not be cutting edge these days but I bet a Skylake M5 will wipe the floor with this thing. Battery life is comparable (when I have it docked in the keyboard, you don't even have the option to use this thing as a tablet) and I have a proper m.2 (256GB) SSD and LTE (although that sure as hell isn't a reason to buy a tablet to me

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now