WOA, Finally

Just a day short of 6 years ago, I wrote about WOA - Windows on ARM. Finally it's here. I've enjoyed my MacBook Air's power management and fan-less operation. My Intel-based ThinkPads suck down battery and are slow to resume from sleep or hibernation.

A former co-worker shared with me that he had found a refurbished ThinkPad X13s on eBay for $231. This was a nice discount from the original list price of $2,169.

Here's a good review (archive.org) on the X13s. The X13s is running a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, an M.2 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. It weighs just over 2 pounds with a 13.3" screen.

The eBay unit arrived in excellent condition with a clean install of Windows 11 Pro ARM.

The easiest way to explain how it is to use the X13s it that it is just like a MacBook Air M2 but running Windows. It is fan-less and the battery life is hours. Pretty much, you only need to plug it in overnight. During the day, just set it down and close the lid. Pick it up hours later and it is instantly just where you left it.

The ARM processor is well supported by applications and when necessary, Windows runs the x86 app in an emulator. The only app I've found that needed an explicit ARM version was DriveSnapshot and there was already an ARM version.

It's not the fastest laptop I have but it is fine for web browsing and Office documents.