Thinking About Surface Laptop (Premium)

As promised, I preordered a Snapdragon X-based Surface Laptop as soon as I could. But I ended up canceling that and changing to a higher-end configuration. Because reasons.

Chief among them, I want to get this right.

I’ve been using Macs since Apple announced Mac OS X and the MacBook Air 15-inch M3 I recently purchased isn’t even my first Apple Silicon-based Mac. But that experience has been so overwhelmingly positive—despite some maddening multitasking inconsistencies that I ended up fixing with third-party apps—that I’ve been itching to get my hands on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X-based laptop. And because the Surface Laptop is the closest possible PC to that MacBook Air—OK, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x comes close, too, actually; more on that below—I’ve had my eye on it since before it was official. After all, we knew that Microsoft would announce Snapdragon X versions of Surface Pro and Surface Laptop right before Build 2024 for about a month before the event.

Surface Laptop is a curious product. It’s about as obvious as it can be, a MacBook Air clone through and through, and not particularly innovative in ways that many other Surface PCs are. But that’s the point: Many PC users, myself included, have wanted a Windows-based MacBook Air since Apple announced the 2nd-generation design in 2010, kicking off the Intel Ultrabook spec. A few PCs have come close, but only Surface Laptop truly nails it.

(And, please, don’t accept the oft-foisted nonsense that any Mac has ever been the best way to run Windows. That’s never been true, and it’s not true today. What was true is that Windows 11 on Arm ran better in emulation on an Apple Silicon-based Mac than it did on actual Snapdragon-based hardware. But the Snapdragon X should put an end to that little bit of inconvenient truth.)

Of course, Apple Silicon raised the bar quite a bit. The latest M3-based MacBook Air is fanless and silent, delivers real-world all-day battery life and then some, and offers excellent performance, a magical combination of attributes that the PC world couldn’t match. Until, maybe, hopefully — now. Thanks to the Snapdragon X family of Arm-based processors, years of underlying platform improvements to Windows 11 on Arm, a major update to Qualcomm’s Prism x86 emulator, unprecedented hardware support from PC makers, and unprecedented software support from app developers, it’s all coming together. And what better way to compare this new platform to the MacBook Air than to use the PC that is its closest copy?

Helping matters, Microsoft quietly stopped providing me with review units for Surface PCs, no doubt because of my routine—and, I think, well deserved—criticism of Panos Panay, who ran that business. Panay is gone now, so maybe that can change. And to be fair, I’ve always approached Surface the same way I approach any product, app, or service I review: Honestly and with an open mind. If Microsoft is interested in an honest review from a non-cheerleader, I’m here.

But I’m also not waiting on them. When Yusuf Mehdi said that we could preorder the new Surface PCs one hour, six minutes, and 30 seconds into Monday’s Copilot+ PC launch event, I opened a browser tab, navigated to Surface.com, and stepped through the preorder process. A quick minute or two later, I had preordered a platinum 15-inch Surface Laptop 7th Generation with 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage for about $1300 before taxes.

And I immediately suffered buyer’s regret. Not because I didn’t want the Surface Laptop, but because of uncertainty. I wanted this to be as close as possible to my MacBook Air, which has 24 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, and this fell short in both areas. I also knew that 16/256 GB is the minimum requirement for a Copilot+ PC, and I always worry about future-proofing when buying an expensive product I plan to actually use over time.

After Monday’s event, I headed into the product showcase and spent hours looking over, touching, and using Surface Laptop and, to a lesser extent, the other PCs available there to us in the room. I knew I’d get some HP and Lenovo PCs to review, so I should have a pretty good body of knowledge and experience with this platform soon. For the moment, I was focused mostly on Surface Laptop, for better or worse.

It was only after I’d left the showcase that I discovered that Surface Laptop—indeed, all Snapdragon X-based PCs, even those using the lower-end Snapdragon X Plus chip—had active cooling with at least one fan. And so the incessant comparisons to MacBook Air, including the one I am currently plotting, were not quite apples to apples. The MacBook Air, after all, is fanless and silent. Surface Laptop is not.

This troubled me, a lot, triggering a new form of buyer’s regret. But I do not buy the argument that Surface Laptop thus competes more with the MacBook Pro than it does with the MacBook Air: Those Macs have fans, yes, but also much faster processors and much nicer (and different size) displays. The MacBook Air is still its closest match, as Microsoft made painfully obvious during the announcement. It’s just not silent or fanless.

But in speaking to Ryan Shrout and reading his terrific Surface Laptop + Snapdragon X Elite report, I calmed down a bit. Like the MacBook Air, Surface Laptop vents straight out the back, below the display, and not downward like many other laptops, so it will be OK on a bed. According to Ryan, who I trust explicitly, the fan noise is non-existent in normal use and minimal under heavy load. I’d still prefer a fanless, silent design. But this should meet my needs, despite the initial disappointment.

Then a new issue arose. The minimum specs for a Copilot+ PC include 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, as noted. And while that configuration would pose no issues for me on any other modern PC, it’s a problem on a Copilot+ PC. It needs RAM to handle the small language model (SLM)-based AI tasks for which these PCs were invented. And it needs storage for all those Recall snapshots. I intend to use all that heavily, and of course, I need to write about it for the Windows 11 Field Guide regardless. Was the Surface Laptop I purchased powerful enough for my needs?

In the end, I decided it was not. As I wrote Ask Paul this past Friday, I resolved to preorder a more powerful Surface Laptop and cancel my initial preorder. In the end, I preordered a black 15-inch Surface Laptop with 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage for about $2100 before taxes and shipping. That’s not exactly what I wanted, but Microsoft’s configuration choices, as described below, are limited. And because of that, it doesn’t match up exactly with my MacBook Air either, as it now has more RAM and storage. Ah well. What can you do?

So let’s take a look at what Microsoft is offering here, as it’s confusing. On the face of things, you can choose Surface Laptop in 13.8 and 15-inch display sizes, with a Snapdragon X Plus or Snapdragon X Elite processor, in one of four colors (Sapphire, Dune, Platinum, and Black), with 16, 32, or 64 GB of storage, and with 256 GB, 512 GB, or 1 TB of storage, for prices that range from $1000 to $2500.

That all sounds very reasonable. Except for one thing: Most of the configuration choices are unavailable. Microsoft limits which of these things you can get together, often in fairly radical ways. It’s a bit maddening, honestly.

To make the point simply, I’ll just focus on the 15-inch Surface Laptop. The base price is $1300, and your only processor choice is Snapdragon X Elite: There are no Snapdragon X Plus models, and it’s not clear from the Surface website which of the three X Elite chips you’re getting.

That’s inexcusable, but based on third-party reports, it appears to be the X1E-80-100, which is the middle of the three chips. This is a 3.4 GHz part with 4 GHz dual-core boost, and like all X Elite chips, it has 12 processor cores. So no worries there.

Once you select the 15-inch Surface Laptop in Microsoft’s configurator, you’re immediately limited to just two of the color choices, Platinum and Black. That’s unfortunate: Sapphire, a sort of pale blue, is gorgeous in person and is unique, and I would almost certainly have chosen that now that I’ve seen it. (I’ve always liked the sand-like colors used by some previous Surface PCs, but the Dune color is more orange in person that I could deal with. It’s weird looking.)

Anyway, I don’t want a black laptop, so for my initial preorder, I chose Platinum and was presented with three configuration choices: 16 GB of RAM with 256 GB of storage for $1300, 16 GB/512 GB for $1500, and 16 GB/1 TB for $1700. And … what? There are no choices with 32 GB or 64 GB of RAM. More to the point, I couldn’t get the combination I wanted, which was 32 GB/512 GB. (I wasn’t surprised that my oddball 24 GB/512 GB MacBook Air configuration wasn’t a choice here.) Were such a thing available, I guess it would cost $1700. But it’s not.

From a pricing perspective, I like that Microsoft consistently undercuts the MacBook Air by at least $200 for the same configurations. For example, my MacBook Air was $1900. If I could somehow configure a Surface Laptop with 24 GB/512 GB, it would cost $1600. Put another way, with the same $1900 and in a mythical world in which one could specify whichever RAM/SSD configuration they wanted, I could get a Surface Laptop in Sapphire with 64 GB/512 GB. (In the real world, that same $1900 gets me 32 GB/1 TB, as noted.)

Anyway, those who need more than 16 GB of RAM are limited to a single color choice, Black. And so for my second go-round, I sighed, selected Black, and reviewed the options. There are four configurations: 16 GB/512 GB ($1500), 16 GB/1 TB ($1700), 32 GB/1 TB ($2100), and 64 GB/1 TB ($2500). Gulp.

If you had told me back in early March, when I was contemplating both the MacBook Air M3 and the coming Snapdragon X PCs, that I would in the course of just a few months spend $1900 on a Mac and then would outspend that on a Surface Laptop, I would have laughed in your face. But given what I had learned in the interim, both from my experiences with the MacBook Air M3 and the escalating reveal of how good Snapdragon X is, I almost had no choice. And so I ended up going with that $2100 configuration. I just spent more than I wanted on a laptop that’s in a color and configuration I don’t want either. Ah boy.

I’m still trying to reconcile this in my brain. With the MacBook Air, I had a nice trade-in (an M1 MacBook Pro 13) to soften the blow, and I stretched out the cost by choosing Apple’s no-interest financing plan. For Surface Laptop, time was of the essence, and while I could probably have figured out some kind of trade-in given some time, I didn’t. I was at least able to finance the Surface Laptop over 18 months. The total cost, including taxes and shipping, is $2,225.99. So I am paying a bit under $125 each month for the next 18 months.

Getting past the price—at least, trying to—I like most of what I see with Surface Laptop.

The 3:2 display is interesting, and I’m curious if that aspect ratio will make it feel bigger than 15 inches. It supports Dolby Vision IQ, a new HDR mode that auto-adapts to the surrounding lighting, a 120 Hz refresh rate, and 600 nits of brightness, which all sounds good.

The RAM is obviously integrated and thus non-upgradeable, as is the case with the MacBook Air, but the SSD is removable and could be upgraded, though I will certainly never do that myself: 1 TB is overkill as it is.

There are two USB-C ports, both with USB4 capabilities (charging, 40 Gbps data transfer, DisplayPort 1.4a), one full-sized USB-A 3.1 port (which could be 5 or 10 Gbps, it’s not clear), and a 3.5-mm combo headphone jack on the left. On the right, we have two curiosities: The aging Surface Connect port, which, like the MagSafe port on the Mac, is used for charging and frees up the USB-C ports for peripherals—and a microSDXC card reader for some reason. The bundled (Surface Connect) power adapter is 65 watts.

The webcam is Full HD (1080p), the same as on the MacBook Air, but supports Windows Hello and Windows Studio Effects, whereas the Mac only offers Touch ID (fingerprint). That said, I wish the Surface Laptop had that option. Connectivity is a step up from the Mac, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 (vs. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3), but that’s basically a wash. And we’ll see on the audio: Microsoft only says that the Surface Laptop has “Omnisonic” speakers, whatever that means, and like the Mac, it has Dolby Atmos sound.

From a size and weight perspective, the Surface Laptop is roughly the same size (12.96 inches by 9.41 inches) as the MacBook Air M3 (13.4 inches by 9.35 inches). But it’s noticeably thicker (0.72 inches vs. 0.45 inches) and heavier (3.67 pounds vs. 3.3 pounds). The MacBook Air’s unique combination of size and weight is a real differentiator, but I’d like to know if Surface Laptops’s shortcomings here will be meaningful in real life.

This raises an interesting point. I’ve been making the case that the Surface Laptop is as close as we have in the Windows PC space to the MacBook Air. But is it? The side profiles of the device provided by Microsoft reveal something I had overlooked: The Surface Laptop has a tapered design that’s a bit more like the previous MacBook Air model than it is like the M2/M3 versions. It’s thicker in the back than it is in the front.

By comparison, the modern MacBook Air design is a consistent height from front to back. This next image probably isn’t exact—I mocked it up myself, so just know I tried to make it as accurate as possible—but you can see how different the designs are: The back of the Surface Laptop is noticeably taller while the front is about the same height.

This made me wonder: Is this new Surface Laptop just using the same chassis as its recent predecessor, the Intel Core Ultra-based Surface Laptop 6? So I looked it up. And, oddly enough, it is not: Each of these PCs has slightly different dimensions, and while the new version is smaller, as expected, the older Intel-based product is actually shorter.

    Surface Laptop 6 (Intel): 13.4 x 9.6 x 0.67 inches
    Surface Laptop 7 (Qualcomm): 12.96 x 9.41 x 0.72 inches

The new Surface Laptop is also a tad lighter, at 3.67 pounds, compared to 3.7 pounds for the Intel-based Surface Laptop 6.

This, in turn, made me think about the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x again. This device doesn’t match up as well with the MacBook Air M3 in some ways. But its 14.5-inch 16:10 display is arguably close enough, and from a distance, it seems to have that same clean, consistent look.

But look a bit closer, and you’ll discover a few issues. It’s not really as clean looking as the MacBook Air—like many laptops, it hides its true height (in this case, 0.51 inches) using a tapered design on the sides—and it vents heat out the bottom like its Intel-based predecessors.

Worse, you can’t even configure the Yoga Slim 7x right now: It comes with 16 GB of RAM, the minimum, and 1 TB of SSD storage. (Configurable models with up to 32 GB of RAM and as little as 512 GB of storage are coming.) Don’t get me wrong. This is still a very interesting computer. Its OLED display is gorgeous, and its price, $1290, is reasonable. But for now, at least, the Surface Laptop is what we’ve got, if what we want is a MacBook Air that runs Windows.

And that is very much what I want.