Why You Should Wait Until 2021 to Buy a 5G PC

(Microsoft Surface Pro X)

By July 2021, people looking for a PC with built-in 5G connectivity will be deciding among at least three broad categories of laptops. There will be inexpensive all-Qualcomm-powered laptops and tablets that use the company's just-announced Snapdragon 8c and 7c computing platforms. There will also be higher-end ones that employ the more powerful Snapdragon 8cx, the first of which is scheduled to go on sale in early 2020 in the form of a Lenovo 2-in-1 convertible design.

Most mainstream users should consider waiting for a third option, however: laptops with a combination of Intel CPUs and MediaTek modems. They'll arrive late, probably by more than a year, but they'll likely be free of software problems that will almost certainly plague the Snapdragon-powered 5G pioneers.

Intel's 5G Delays

Intel is behind Qualcomm on 5G technology after abandoning its own 5G modem project earlier this year. That means it still has to create firmware and software drivers, hand them off to MediaTek to develop and start production of a custom 5G modem, and then work with yet another company to create the finished chipset.

Intel confirmed to PCMag this week that this process won't be finished until the first half of 2021, at which point Lenovo's Snapdragon 8cx-powered laptop will have already been on sale for more than a year. But if the past year or so of Snapdragon-powered laptop launches have taught early adopters anything, it's that their overall computing experiences are far more frustrating than what the average consumer will likely experience if they wait for 5G connectivity to become as ubiquitous on laptops as it is certain to become on phones.

The frustration largely stems from the occasionally significant effort required to get the vast catalog of Windows software to run properly on Snapdragon processors. Snapdragon's ARM architecture is incompatible with the x86 architecture on which most Windows apps and drivers are built. The result is that many apps, from web browsers to games, run sluggishly on Snapdragon-powered laptops, while others (especially multimedia content creation programs) can't run at all.

This was the situation with the first Snapdragon laptop PCMag tested, the Asus NovaGo, and not much has changed with the latest one we've tested, the Microsoft Surface Pro X, which uses a modified version of the Snapdragon 8cx called the Microsoft SQ1. A recent glance at the top 100 games available for download from the Microsoft Store shows that around half won't run natively on current Snapdragon-powered laptops.

Unless Qualcomm and Microsoft come up with a silver bullet that removes all of the software problems very quickly, this situation will likely still persist once 8c- and 7c-powered laptops go on sale.

Resist the Temptation

While we don't yet know how much 8c- and 7c-powered 5G laptops will cost, they're likely to be much cheaper than the $1,000 Surface Pro X. According to Qualcomm, the new Snapdragon 7c is designed to power extremely inexpensive laptops, maybe even down in the $300 range.

So legions of price-sensitive consumers who would otherwise consider an Intel Celeron-powered Windows laptop or a Chromebook will suddenly be able to gaze fondly upon a similarly priced Snapdragon 7c laptop that also can connect to nascent but very buzzworthy 5G networks. The legions of educational institutions that currently use Chromebooks will, too.

For many of these most price-sensitive laptop buyers, there's actually nothing wrong with springing for the 7c-powered system. A Celeron-powered Windows laptop or Chromebook already offers inherently limited processing power, so Qualcomm's decision to go after this market with cheaper versions of its ARM-derived chips actually makes a lot of sense. The company says that the 8c will come with a 4G LTE modem by default, but it can be paired with an X55 modem for 5G connectivity.

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If you want a 5G-capable laptop that can hold its own with the best-performing circa-$1,000 ultraportables available today, however, it's probably worth waiting to see what the Intel-MediaTek combination has to offer. Even better, it's almost certain that if the Intel-MediaTek 5G modem turns out to be a dud, laptop makers will pair 5G modems from Qualcomm or other companies with Intel processors. And this is before you factor in the spotty availability of both the 5G networks and plans that offer them, both of which will likely improve.

Ultimately, it's quite possible that Snapdragon-powered laptops will achieve parity with their Intel-powered competitors by the first half of 2021. That's more than a year away, which is an eternity in the personal tech world. But that's also about the same amount of time that the current crop of Snapdragon laptops have been around, and their capabilities have so far left us unimpressed.

1 Cool Thing: Asus NovaGo (TP370QL)