It has been eighteen months since Microsoft and Qualcomm promised us the moon. They stood on stage, gestured wildly at the future, and told us the "Wintel" monopoly was dead. They claimed x86 was a dinosaur and that the future was ARM-based Copilot+ PCs. They showed us flashy charts comparing battery life to MacBooks and touted Neural Processing Units (NPUs) as if they were going to magically refactor our legacy codebases.

If you work in a startup in San Francisco where the entire tech stack consists of a web browser, a cloud instance, and VS Code, that hype train is moving fast and smooth. But we aren’t in Silicon Valley. We are in Central PA.

Here in the land of manufacturing, healthcare, and state government, "innovation" usually means "we finally upgraded the server that runs the HVAC system." In our world, compatibility isn't a nice-to-have feature; it is oxygen. And right now, the Windows on ARM ecosystem is gasping for air in some very specific, very painful ways.

However, I am also a pragmatist. I currently have two Dell Copilot+ laptops sitting on my desk. One is the traditional x86 architecture, and one is the new ARM variant. I want to hate the ARM one. I want to tell you it’s a toy.

But I can’t. Because the hardware is spectacular. The battery life is arguably the first time a Windows machine has felt like a true mobile device rather than a desktop requiring a tether. The performance on native apps puts the "fine" performance of the x86 model to shame.

So, we have a dilemma. We have superior hardware held back by a software ecosystem that is still figuring out how to tie its shoes, and an IT mindset that might be too outdated to support it.

Let’s cut through the marketing noise and look at the actual operational reality of utilizing these machines side-by-side.

The ARM Experience: The Mobile Warrior If your user base consists of sales reps, C-suite executives, or project managers who live in Office 365, Teams, and Edge, the ARM laptop is a no-brainer. The battery life is genuine. They can fly from Harrisburg to Chicago, work the flight, present at the client site, and fly back without ever hunting for a power outlet. It is liberating.

Furthermore, we are seeing a fascinating niche emerging in security. Some forward-thinking security vendors are finally leveraging that NPU to run local threat detection models. This offloads the heavy lifting from the CPU, meaning your security agent isn't eating 30% of your resources while scanning for malware. That is a legitimate win for the enterprise.

The x86 Experience: The Safe Bet The x86 version is... fine. It works. The battery life is similar in idle states but drops faster under load. It runs hot. It needs fans. But it opens every single .exe file I have ever collected since 1998.

The Reality Gap: The "Beta" Life The problem arises when you drift outside the Microsoft walled garden on the ARM device. It has been 18 months. Why is a major VPN provider like Private Internet Access (PIA) still treating their ARM client as a "beta"? In the enterprise, "beta" means "ticket generator." In the enterprise, "beta" means a frantic call to the helpdesk at 7:00 AM on a Monday.

Why is Discord—a primary communication tool for many dev teams—still running as an x86 emulated app that feels sluggish?

And for the creatives in your marketing department? Do not give them these machines. While Photoshop runs, Adobe Illustrator refuses to even install. Imagine explaining to your VP of Marketing that their shiny new laptop, which costs more than my first car, can't run the industry standard for vector graphics.

This is the Central PA reality. We run on legacy.

Now, let’s talk about the headache that no one in marketing mentions: Imaging.

If you are a traditional shop, you are likely relying on "Gold Images." You have a carefully curated .wim file or a heavy SCCM task sequence that blasts a monolithic image onto a hard drive.

If you introduce Windows on ARM into your environment, congratulations: You have just doubled your workload.

You cannot push an x86 image onto an ARM processor. The drivers are different. The kernel interaction is different. The boot process is different. You now have to maintain two distinct Gold Images. You have to patch two images. You have to test your application packaging against two architectures.

If you are a lean IT team of three people managing 500 endpoints for a logistics company in York, this isn't an "opportunity." It’s a punishment.

However... if this is your primary worry, I have some tough love for you.

If managing two images scares you, you are approaching laptop provisioning wrong.

The hassle of maintaining dual images is a symptom of a larger disease: "Old IT" thinking.

In the old world, we measured success by how long we could keep a laptop alive and how much money we saved on the purchase price. We viewed IT as a Cost Center. We accepted that onboarding a new hire took weeks. We accepted that a laptop needed to be brought into the office, plugged into ethernet, and imaged for four hours before it was usable.

If you are looking at Windows on ARM, you cannot use Old IT methods. You must embrace Modern Provisioning (think Microsoft Autopilot and Intune).

Instead of maintaining monolithic images, you manage policies and configurations. You ship the laptop directly from Dell to the employee's house. They open the box, connect to Wi-Fi, sign in with their Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), and the configurations flow down like water.

Whether the chip inside is x86 or ARM shouldn't matter to your deployment process. The policy says "Install Office," and the laptop grabs the binary that matches its architecture. The policy says "Encrypt Drive," and BitLocker engages.

This brings us to the most critical metric that Central PA businesses ignore: Time to Value.

Digitally Transformed organizations do not consider IT as a Cost Center. Instead, IT is considered the Performance Engine of the organization.

Let’s look at the math.

If a new hire isn't productive in hours rather than weeks, that is a reflection on how the organization thinks of the IT department.

The Windows on ARM shift forces this conversation. If you try to manage these devices with 2015 tools (imaging), you will fail. If you use them as a catalyst to modernize your provisioning, you turn IT into a competitive advantage.

Here is the reality check: You have to move off Windows 10. The End of Life clock is ticking. You are likely planning a hardware refresh anyway to support Windows 11.

So, should you be switching to Windows on ARM?

I know exactly what is going to happen. Your Product Manager or CIO is going to see a commercial for these laptops and ask, "Why aren't we buying these? They have AI!"

They don't care about driver emulation or provisioning times. You do.

To save you from a two-hour argument, I created the "ARM Readiness & Provisioning Matrix." It’s a simple one-pager that scores your user personas against compatibility risks AND scores your IT department's readiness to deploy them.

[Download for Subscribers Only: The ARM Readiness & Provisioning Matrix (PDF)]

This download includes a checklist for moving from "Gold Images" to Autopilot.

Not a subscriber? You’re missing out on the tools that keep the lights on. Subscribe below to get access.

I’m curious—who in the 717, 814, or 610 area codes has successfully ditched "Gold Images" for Autopilot? And did you use that modernization to sneak some ARM devices into the fleet? Reply to this email and let me know.

Here's to challenging the hype, adapting the tool, and connecting with your craft.

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