There's been several reports of a partnership between microsoft and qualcomm to make an "always on" cheap laptop running a snapdragon 835. So just like a phone is always on, can receive message at any time, and ideally the battery lasts all day. Said project would emulate x86 on the arm to allow backward compatibility.
Chromebooks are having somewhat of the opposite battle. Intel's trying to emulate arm to run android apps on chromebooks. The reports I've seen is that intel's not competing so well. Many popular android apps run better on an arm chromebook than an intel chromebook.
In both cases I think the consumer wins, competition is good, and I'd consider a new chromebook just for the hardware and then I'd install some flavor of linux on it.
A managed OS like ChromeOS makes the underlying processor irrelevant, for application developers that is, which means more competition among those the deliver CPUs to OEMs.
Chromebooks are having somewhat of the opposite battle. Intel's trying to emulate arm to run android apps on chromebooks. The reports I've seen is that intel's not competing so well. Many popular android apps run better on an arm chromebook than an intel chromebook.
In both cases I think the consumer wins, competition is good, and I'd consider a new chromebook just for the hardware and then I'd install some flavor of linux on it.