Microsoft bet against Intel with its new Surfaces and lost

Microsoft’s latest Surface hardware is now out in the world, and it’s clear that the biggest gamble that the company took with this year’s models — a move away from Intel’s market-dominating processors — hasn’t quite panned out.

The focus on non-Intel chips was a big part of Microsoft’s 2019 Surface announcement. The company went out of its way to highlight the new, co-engineered Ryzen Surface Edition processor for the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3, which was optimized specifically for Microsoft’s design. And the ARM-powered Surface Pro X, with a next-generation design and a custom variant of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx chip, was supposed to represent the future of the Surface.

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