That said, everything changed last October via a completely unexpected source: the release of Windows 11. And although Microsoft’s efforts to bolster Win64 capabilities were tangible, they didn’t come robustly or quickly (the other reason why my first purchase of a Surface Pro X didn’t pan out) enough to notably “move the needle.” As I wrote a year ago, the platform’s Win32 emulation support, albeit seemingly robust, was being rendered increasingly irrelevant by application developers’ migrations to Win64 code and APIs. To that latter point…my interest in the Surface Pro X (and Windows-on-Arm more generally) has always been on its promised future capabilities versus any underwhelm in its existing status.
Conversely, 16 GBytes of DRAM versus the 8 GByte baseline, both to stave off future obsolescence (since, as is unfortunately commonly the case nowadays, the memory is soldered to the motherboard…in Apple’s case, it’s even integrated alongside the processor in a common package) and to provide memory headroom for x86 emulation.A baseline 256 GByte SSD versus the drastically more expensive 512 GByte variant, since I knew that if I ran short of room in the future, I could upgrade the storage myself (something I’ve actually already done, via a $150+ 1 TByte Western Digital m.2 2230 drive complete with a 2-year extended warranty off eBay, and a process complicated only by the current dearth of “cloning” software support for Windows-on-Arm).The Qualcomm 8cx-based SQ1 SoC, since the successor SQ2’s marginal performance improvements didn’t justify the price increase (IMHO, at least).And my last (but definitely not least) attempt was last June, again an eBay Certified Refurbished item (ironically from the same merchant), this time for just under $800 with tax. But the merchant reported that inventory was already depleted when my order came in, canceled it, and promptly refunded my money. I subsequently sought to purchase a Surface Pro X from the Certified Refurbished section of eBay’s site a few weeks later for around the same price, just under $1,100 inclusive of sales tax.
The acquisition attempt documented in that year-ago write-up was my (my wife’s, more accurately) first try, in early November 2020, and was thwarted by (among other things) a missing AC adapter. As I briefly mentioned a few months back (see “ A holiday shopping guide for engineers: 2021 edition“), and in contrast to previous conceptual criticism (see “ Windows on Arm: All of Apple’s challenges with none of its charm“), the third time was the charm when it came to attempted purchases of a Microsoft Surface Pro X:
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