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Snapdragon® X Elite AI-PCs – All Hype? (And why you should NOT learn Python)

Late last week I received a new Snapdragon X Elite laptop, and I used generative AI to help me analyse it, a real-world use-case that combines my passion for PC hardware and AI. In a laptop I look for reasonable performance for everyday productivity tasks, good webcam and sound for all the conference calls we do these days, and long battery life when you are outside the office.

So what does a laptop have to do with AI? And no, I am not discussing the “AI-PC”.

I want to show why most people should stop learning Python if all they want to do is data analysis. I still see classes of people struggling to learn Python for data analysis. I still hear of management dictating that all staff must go learn Python programming so that they can do better data analysis (and AI!). Prior to the current wave of Generative AI (GenAI), insightful data analysis could already be done with visual drag-and-drop data analysis tools like Orange Data Mining (free and open-source), and various others both free and commercial.

Today, the basic analysis most knowledge workers need can be done by GenAI tools already trained to analyse spreadsheets of data. What you need to learn today is NOT Python programming, but how to analyse data and ask the right questions!

Is the Snapdragon X Elite laptop good?

In one word, yes, at least for mundane productivity workloads. The screen is a gorgeous OLED. The webcam and audio quality are acceptable for business conference calls, although not as good as my MacBook Pro M3. The laptop feels snappy. Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint open fast and work well. Even non-native ARM64 applications are usable, and I cannot perceive any significant slowdown. The laptop is lappable. It is warmer than my MacBook, but just barely, when doing mundane productivity workloads.

But the battery life is not as claimed on my system, and I suspect BIOS updates could be coming very soon.

  1. Mundane productivity usage: Battery drains on average 0.15% per minute or 9-10% per hour, so that puts the laptop at approximately 10 hours of usage.
  2. Laptop sleep/hibernate issue: 2% per hour when the laptop is closed (both sleep and hibernate mode).

And yes, there are no long running or heavy duty tasks running in the background, all updates applied, all Google Drive and One Drive files and folders are synced, and Windows indexing completed.

Stop Learning Python

But this article is about AI, specifically about using GenAI to analyse data without you learning Python!

It pains me to see many knowledge workers with no programming or STEM background struggle to learn Python, thinking that it would help them become data scientists or AI engineers within a few short weeks/months. This is just unrealistic and a big lie.

Then we have management dictating that all staff learn Python so that they become data-savvy. For many knowledge workers working with Excel spreadsheets, data from corporate databases and other forms of data, there is no need to learn Python (or R).

What is required instead are classes like “How to analyse data?” and “How to visualise data”. Foundational training in how to analyse data (with tools, and not Python!), what questions to ask of the data, and how to frame your questions to get the right answers.

How I used GenAI to analyse my Snapdragon battery performance?

So, last evening I recorded the battery percentages as I was doing usual mundane productivity tasks (PowerPoint and Web):

I could have used Excel to plot the chart and use the FORECAST formula to predict when the laptop will drain to zero. But my Excel is rusty. My Python is even more rusty. So this morning, I copied the above table and pasted it into Claude Sonnet 3.5.

But I prefer to see data presented visually, so I prompted Claude to give me a chart instead.

But ultimately, the answer we want to know is how many hours will the battery last!

So we have a nice chart, and we now know that under my typical usage this laptop will last approximately 10 hours, not the 14-24 hours claimed by laptop manufacturers.

Conclusion

Should I keep this laptop? Perhaps. It is light, powerful, lasts 10 hours, which suffices for my needs. It also runs cool, and the fans are inaudible during “mundane productivity” usage and when connected to my monitors.

But what really matters is that knowledge workers embrace GenAI tools for increased effectiveness. Go learn the art of asking effective questions, of your data and of the GenAI tool.