Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: Initial Hardware Compatibility

Because I’m in Mexico now, I don’t have a complete range of hardware peripherals to test with the Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PC I’m reviewing, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14. This follows a similarly incomplete look at software compatibility that focused on the core apps I use each day.

And, as with that write-up, my initial assessment is overwhelmingly positive.

Regarding yesterday and my week-late first experiences, I didn’t receive the Yoga until about 1:00 pm local time. I had waited at the apartment for FedEx to arrive with the PC, having been informed of a 10:30 to 1:30 delivery window. I took several photos of the devices, booted it up for the first time, and then my wife and I headed out to lunch. Because we had a dinner reservation last night at 6:30, I only had a few hours to get up and running with the PC, but I did what I could.

I also got a few other things done, which I’ll write about later, including installing two games from Steam so I could test how that worked. Those games installed while we were at dinner, and last night, I sat down to try one of them for about 30 minutes. In doing so, I plugged in my Xbox Wireless Controller over USB-C: It just worked, with no pop-ups or installation requirements.

But that was it for hardware compatibility. Today, I hope to focus on a few Snapdragon X/Windows 11 on Arm angles. One of them being the aforementioned games support. And one of them hardware compatibility, which is the focus here.

This morning, I walked into the living room and experienced a near-miracle: I lifted the lid on the Yoga Slim and the display fired on immediately, before it was even fully open and visible. In this way, it works just like the MacBook Air. And nothing at all like the Meteor Lake-based x64 PCs I’ve reviewed this year, which I’ve described as a roulette wheel of experiences because you never know what you’re going to get.

As I think I mentioned elsewhere, I had taken a look at the Lenovo Vantage app earlier to see what configuration options were available. There’s not much: There’s a front-end to the Dolby Atmos capabilities, which I had previously set to “Dynamic.” There are some superfluous (to me) Wi-Fi capabilities.

And then there are “Modes” by which Lenovo adjusts the performance/efficiency dynamics of the PC. (This is not unique to Snapdragon X, these are available on its x64 laptops too.) There are modes for Gaming, Media, and so on. But there’s also an “Automatic” setting, by which Lenovo uses AI to auto-select a mode on the fly. I had enabled this feature yesterday.

I had previously noticed that the Windows 11 power mode–configured in Settings > System > Power & battery–had been set to Best Performance and had changed that to Balanced. It’s not clear if Lenovo, like HP, overrides the Windows 11 power managements settings, but I assume the changes I made with Vantage would do so.

Related to this, I noticed during the initial setup that the Yoga supports the native Windows 11 presence sensing features–this comes up during the Privacy configuration screen in the Out of Box Experience (OOBE) when available–and so this morning I took a closer look. In addition to the normal screen off/sleep options when on power or battery, the Yoga is configured to turn off the screen when I leave, dim the screen when I look away, and turn on the screen when I approach, the latter of which makes Windows Hello facial recognition as automatic as possible. I’ll leave that all on for now–I did enable facial recognition, and there’s no fingerprint reader–and see how it goes.

This morning, I decided to try and use the Yoga to record First Ring Daily. I maybe should have thought of this further in advance of the show, but it’s fun to throw caution to the wind sometimes. This setup involves using a new Anker PowerExpand 8-in-1 USB-C PD 10Gbps Data Hub (a USB-C hub) that replaced the original unit, as my wife is now using two of these, one at home and one here in Mexico City. I brought this along specifically in case I was able to test a Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PC: I usually use an HP Thunderbolt 4 Dock here in Mexico, and it wasn’t clear if it would work with these PCs. (More on that in a moment.)

A quick aside: I’d been having all kinds of reliability issues with the Meteor Lake-based HP ZBook Firefly 14 G11 I just reviewed until a series of firmware and driver updates seemed to resolve most of that. But one issue remained: Each morning, when I placed the ZBook on the laptop stand I use here and connected it to the USB-C hub, the Dell UltraSharp HDR 4K Webcam I use would never work. (We record over Google Meet, but the camera not working was universal and not Meet-related.) So I would unplug it from the USB-C hub, re-plug it, reconnect in the app, wait a bit, and … then it would work. I went through this basically every weekday morning on this trip.

The Yoga Slim experience was comparatively trouble-free, though with a similar (and yet unrelated, I think, issue). When I placed the PC in the laptop stand and plugged in the USB-C hub, it quickly detected the hardware, immediately enabling my Dell P2422H Full HD Monitor external display, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Mouse (connected via a dongle), and Audio-Technica ATR2500x-USB cardioid condenser microphone correctly. So that’s a win (or a series of wins) too, but for one thing: The webcam did not work initially. Naturally, I thought it was experiencing the same issue as before, and that there might thus be something wrong with the camera.

Or not. I rifled through my gadget bag, found an HP USB-C to USB-A dongle I travel with, and tried that with the camera, directly connected to the PC. It works fine. (Which is why the webcam is bolded above.) So perhaps there is something wrong with the USB-A port on the USB-C hub. (To find out, I later moved the Microsoft dongle to the port I was using with the webcam and it works fine. So I plugged the webcam back into the USB-C hub, using the port previously used by the dongle. The camera still doesn’t work, lol. Whatever.)

In setting up for First Ring Daily, I was reminded that the Yoga Slim doesn’t have a 3-mm headphone/microphone jack, which is unfortunate. I use a USB microphone, but I use wired Sony old-school headphones, and … ah well. The USB microphone has a 3-mm jack and I did use the headphones with that. But I don’t normally because I can hear myself through the headphones when used like this, and I’m louder than those around me.

I later researched this: This effect is called monitoring, and there is an option in the Control Panel to turn this feature off on a per-device basis. Doing so doesn’t work, however, and I can see via Google that many others, with many devices, have experienced the same. I suspect this is a vestigial mistake in Windows similar to the issue I raised recently in Details, Details (Premium) but even older. It has nothing to do with Windows 11 on Arm, at least.

Well, that all happened before 9:00. It was time to dig a bit deeper.

All three phones I brought–an Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, Google Pixel 8 Pro, and Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra–connected immediately and worked normally. My Bose QuietComfort Earbuds (gen 1) connected over Bluetooth immediately and work normally. I have two Samsung T7 Portable SSD drives, both protected with BitLocker-To-Go, both worked fine. So did every USB flash drive I have, new and old, the most recent being two Verbatim 64GB Store ‘n’ Go Dual OTG USB 3.2 Gen 1 Flash Drives I really like (they work with both USB-C and USB-A). Every USB cable I brought appears to work fine. And the white Pixel USB-C Earbuds I may use for podcasts now also works properly.

I also brought a different and smaller, travel-sized USB-C hub just in case, an HP Elite USB-C Hub HSA-Q001U with one HDMI 2.0 port, one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 port, and up to 90-watt power pass-through over USB-C. It worked great across each port.

In doing all this testing, I noticed one troubling behavior, however: Many times, but not always, when I unplugged a cable or device from the single USB4 Type-C port on the right side of the PC, the display(s) would turn off. It wasn’t going to sleep, I don’t think, as tapping a keyboard key would bring it all back. But … strange.

That’s most of what I brought with me or have here in Mexico.

But there is that dock, an HP Thunderbolt Dock G4 with 120 watts of power delivery. I had removed it from my setup earlier in the trip, so I fished it out of the storage pin and put it all back together. And I am surprised to report that it works just fine. The Yoga, like all Snapdragon X-based PCs, is not certified for Thunderbolt, but it works great.

That’s pretty much all I can test here. I’m impressed: Everything I could test worked immediately and normally. And my only real concern, the lack of a 3-mm headphone/microphone jack, is specific to this PC: The Surface Laptop 15-inch that’s waiting for me at home has this jack, and I suspect many/most other Copilot+ PCs do too.

More soon.