Microsoft: Expect new Surfaces to excel in productivity, not games

One of the big questions surrounding the launch of the Microsoft Surface Pro (2024) and new Copilot+ PCs is how well those laptops will run the broad ecosystem of Windows applications. So will they run just about everything? Pretty much, says a senior Microsoft executive, minus gaming.

I’ve asked the Windows on Arm “app compat” question before — in April, for example, of Kedar Kondap, the senior vice president and general manager of Compute and Gaming for Qualcomm, told me that the days of app issues on Arm were pretty much over. But Pete Kyriacou, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Devices, said in an interview that Microsoft is focusing in on productivity apps first and foremost.

I asked Kyriacou what we should expect in terms of application compatibility running on the new Surface devices.

“It’s great,” Kyriacou responded. “The app compat gets better. Like I would say three different [points]….One of them is many more app developers have gone native with their app. So we’ll see that — especially browsers, where people spend most of their time. All major browsers are native. Now we’ve got… input from Adobe. And we saw some of the creative apps across Blackmagic and DaVinci. Slack is now native as well. And so we just see people coming natively.

“The second [point] is our Prism emulator where you’re able to run the apps faster,” Kyriacou added. “Windows is redesigned from the bottom up to take advantage of it. So that helps a lot in terms of when apps are being emulated. They’re being emulated in a really fast way, efficiently by Windows.”

Kyriacou also said the Snapdragon X Elite’s multithreaded CPU would not only increase the performance of emulated apps, but also increase the responsiveness of apps as they launch. “So we’ve done some pretty awesome things to make sure app compat has made a big leap,” Kyriacou said. “We feel like the world is ready for it, and we’re going to see that in the response.”

All right, so it will run everything that consumers want to run?

“Pretty much, yeah,” Kyriacou responded. “We were focused on making sure it runs everything, specifically on productivity and what people are doing.

“When it comes to gaming, that’s probably the one area we’re not — we don’t have anti-cheat on Arm,” Kyriacou added. “And so we’re not able to run some of those triple-A titles that are in that space. But we’re also making sure we’re meeting our customers where they’re at in their expectations, like when they’re running a pro device. We want to focus on cloud gaming and be able to stream and run things from the cloud.”

That’s consistent with what we’ve heard from Qualcomm, whose executives have said that they “won’t ever be done” optimizing games for its Snapdragon chips.

But will everything work out as planned? Microsoft’s new Surface devices usher in the new era of Copilot+ PCs. We’ll see if they live up to the promises.