Microsoft Teases Surface for Business Announcements on January 30

Microsoft will have some Surface for Business news at the New York stop of its Microsoft AI Tour on January 30, 2025. As spotted by Windows Central, a recent post from the Microsoft Surface account on Linkedin teased “a major announcement from Surface for Business.”

Last year, Microsoft launched the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 for Business in April and marketed them as its first “AI PCs” for business users. This was before the company revealed the Qualcomm-powered Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7 in May, introducing the new “Copilot+” category along the way. Business versions of the Surface ARM-based Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop were also released in September alongside a new Surface Pro 10 with 5G.

According to Windows Central’s Zac Bowden, Microsoft is getting ready to launch new business versions of the Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 with Intel Lunar Lake CPUs. As you may remember, a listing for a new Surface Laptop prototype with an Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU was briefly spotted on a Chinese website back in October, and the device looked identical to the Qualcomm-powered Surface Laptop 7. “I have heard that Microsoft will offer a 5G variant of the Surface Laptop 7 with Intel for the first time, but this likely won’t begin shipping until much later in the year,” Bowden wrote today.

Intel’s Lunar Lake Core Ultra CPUs support the same Copilot+ PC features that Microsoft first launched on its Qualcomm-powered Surface models last year. In December, Microsoft made Recall and Click to Do Preview available for Windows Insiders with Intel Lunar Lake AMD Zen 5-based PCs.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft continues to use ARM and x86 chips to differentiate the consumer and business versions of its flagship Surface devices. While the new Prism emulator on Windows 11 version 24H2 significantly improved the performance of emulated x64 apps on ARM devices, business users will likely continue to prefer devices with x86 CPUs to ensure the best compatibility with apps and drivers.