It may sound crazy that I would need a lot of firepower, but try trading for a living in Schwab's StreetSmart Edge (SSE), and then tell me that it's fast. I understand that all you need is Office 365 to do your job, but I can't do mine with a massively underpowered CPU and a slow SSD, with far too little RAM (16 GB). They're real applications, but they're not Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Acrobat, Telegram, thinkorswim, Zoom, Calibre, MobaXterm, WireGuard, Directory Opus, Rstudio, MS Project with WBS Schedule Pro, Discord, Deemix, LiquidText, Nebo, and lots of others. If you need a machine to do actual work on, the SPX won’t work. I use the SPX ten hours a day, every day, at least, and I promise you that it’s so slow for me as a full-time stick and options trade that I can’t take it anymore.

The only reason someone running native Excel would think that it’s “fast” is because Excel almost never uses any CPU firepower. It’s a very slow machine, whether running in emulation or native ARM64. The people who say that it’s comparable to an Intel i7 haven’t tested real applications in it. When you type a word, you often need to wait fir 0.5 seconds or 1.0 seconds to see it in the screen. I’m running Windows 11, and battery life is the same as always: absolutely terrible. To give you an idea, it takes 180 seconds to launch StreetSmart Edge, and often longer to launch ThinkOrSwim, on my 16 GB RAM SPX with an SQ1 CPU.

Running a trading platform such as TD Ameritrade’s ThinkOrSwim or Schwab’s StreetSmart Edge is extremely slow.

Sq1 processor