> But today's new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are the first Arm devices to be the primary Surface offerings rather than a side offering, and they're the first to credibly claim that they can both outperform comparable Intel- and AMD-designed chips while offering better battery life, a la Apple's M1 chip in 2020.
Microsoft's ARM-powered Surface Pro sounds like the first credible step to move the whole consumer market away from the x86 family, and thus kill Intel's stranglehold on how people use computers as their daily driver. This is a historical change, and one which might as well spell the death of behemoths such as Intel. People are no longer bounded by an anti-competitive stranglehold on their choices to pick Intel products over any conceivable competitor, and this happens at a point in time when Intel is already struggling.