You better believe it Microsoft announced the next generation Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, but the Redmond staff made them business-only

But as it turns out, this was all intentional We've been following the Qualcomm breadcrumbs for a while now, and as expected, these leaks have effectively confirmed that we will be getting the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 with Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite, respectively

What does this mean for performance and power efficiency? And more importantly, does it mean that Microsoft has finally reached a point where it can compete with Apple's silicon? Let's dig deeper

Well, here's a list of names What makes us so sure these are Surface Pro 10 and Laptop 6? It's because they are consistent with how Microsoft codesigns their hardware" OEMBR OEMBR" stands for Surface Laptop, while "OEMMN OEMMN" is the Surface Pro laptop/tablet hybrid

Let's start with the latter, which will be powered by the lower-end Snapdragon X Plus model announced yesterday; not much data is known about this, as the only statistic listed on Geekbench is the ML score, which tests the CPU's AI machine learning capabilities

This is not necessarily the most effective test, as it does not touch the NPU itself, but it does show that the X Plus is faster than the M3 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro by a touch

Moving quickly to the Surface Laptop 6, which appears to be a mid-tier Snapdragon X Elite based on core count and clock speed, the full Geekbench 63 results show that the M3 MacBook Air's single-core performance (thanks to the 3nm process) is frankly ridiculously impressive, to say the least, but the 4nm X Elite comes close and manages to overtake Apple's notebook in multi-core scores

On top of that, both feature 16GB DDR5 RAM, another blow to Cupertino's choice of offering just 8GB as a base spec

My point is to watch the Microsoft Build closely; it looks likely that strong hardware will be announced for these two laptops, which herald the dawn of the Snapdragon X-arm laptop era The silicon wars have reached a fever point, and Apple knows it