Not a Fan (Premium)

For several months, I waited for some inevitable bad news to ruin the Qualcomm Snapdragon X party. And yesterday, it finally happened. I discovered an inconvenient truth that shattered one of my core assumptions about the chipset. And now I need to decide whether this could undermine the entire experience, halting my growing excitement in its tracks.

What is this problem, you ask?

PCs built on Snapdragon X aren’t passively cooled devices. Instead, they use fans as part of an active cooling system. And that means they are not silent, like the Apple Silicon M3-based MacBook Air. This is important: As I noted in my review, the MacBook Air M3 is a magical combination of performance, battery life, thinness, light weight, and silence, the latter thanks to its fanless design.

Before discovering this, I preordered a 15-inch Surface Laptop with 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage because it’s the closest Windows alternative to the MacBook Air 15. I did so the moment that Yusuf Mehdi noted that we could do so during Microsoft’s Monday event, taking advantage of the fact that he was speaking to a room full of people and not the entire world, as the company wasn’t live-streaming the event.

And then I wasn’t so sure.

The Snapdragon X-based Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air M3 are still quite similar in form and function, and they still share many of the same beguiling characteristics. But the MacBook Air stands alone in one of the crucial comparison points. It is silent, not some of the time or most of the time, but all the time. And the Surface Laptop is not.

So I set out to discover what I could about this issue, knowing that I had plenty of time to cancel my preorder if needed, or even return it after receiving it in late June if the fan noise transforms what otherwise seems like a wonderful laptop into something a bit more pedestrian.

And then I hit the mother lode. Our friend Ryan Shrout has written a detailed report analyzing the performance and capabilities of the new Surface Laptop on behalf of Microsoft. In addition to answering all the lingering questions we’ve had about the performance and battery life of Snapdragon X-based PCs, this report also addresses the fan issue. It may be all the information I need, short of actually receiving the device and testing it for myself.

So let me start with the fan noise. After all, this is the unexpected new stumbling block.

According to Ryan’s testing, the new Surface Laptop runs significantly cooler than its predecessor, the 12th Gen Intel Core i7-based Surface Laptop 5 when running a standard workload. As good, the new Surface Laptop is “incredibly quiet” in this scenario, emitting 26.3 dbA (decibels adjusted for human hearing) of sound. To put that in perspective, a silent study room is rated at 20 dbA, while a soft whisper from 5 feet away is rated at 40 dbA. Hm.

Under heavy, consistent load, the fans in the new Surface Laptop get louder, of course, and hit 32.2 dbA. That’s a bit quieter than Surface Laptop 5, at 33.6 dbA. But an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H-based MSI Prestige EVO AI that Ryan also tested was “noticeably louder” at 39.5 dbA. But the MacBook Air, of course, is completely silent.

I’ve written many times that decisions are usually nuanced, a matrix of choices, and that each individual must weigh each of those choices in making decisions. And in the case, the question is obvious enough: Is the weight of this fact—the new Surface Laptop is not non-silent—enough to tilt the scales and cause me to look elsewhere?

I can’t fully answer that question because I don’t have a Surface Laptop and can’t judge for myself how bad it is. But one of the little joys of the MacBook Air is that I can lay on a bed, or a couch, and use the thing without any fear that it will heat up, let alone start spewing fan noise. When I do this with a Windows laptop, I try to place a book, magazine, or even my iPad under it to prevent any issues. This isn’t necessary with the MacBook Air. But is this a dealbreaker?

Hm.

It depends in part, too, on how well the new Surface Laptop addresses the MacBook Air threat. To hear Microsoft and Qualcomm describe things, it does so quite well: The MacBook Air came up repeatedly at yesterday’s event, always as the foil to laptops based on the Snapdragon X, and often specifically to Surface Laptop.

But here, again, Ryan’s report—which everyone interested in Snapdragon X and Windows 11 on Arm needs to read for themselves—provides some very useful, non-partisan, and trustworthy data points. And it goes like this. The Surface Laptop is less expensive than MacBook AIr, about $200 when configured comparably. The thermals are solid and, as noted, the fan noise, while present, is not horrible. Battery life is excellent and exceeds that of the MacBook Air by roughly 15 percent, depending on workloads and other factors.

Performance is likewise excellent, with Surface Laptop beating the MacBook Air handily in multithreaded tests and coming up just behind it in single threaded. From an AI/NPU perspective, the Surface Laptop comes out significantly ahead of any competition; it’s about 2x the NPU performance of the MacBook Air M3.

Emulated performance will vary according to apps and one’s respective toolset. But here, Ryan has good news too: Using Lightroom Classic, the Surface Laptop is neck-and-heck with the MacBook Air M3, and it’s only 17 percent slower with Blender 4.11. “Any programs that haven’t yet been converted over to an Arm-native version will still run exceedingly well on the new Surface Laptop,” Ryan says.

The only area in which the MacBook Air seems to have a measurable and important advantage is with web browsing via Chrome—it’s about 40 percent faster—but Surface Laptop destroys the PC competition, and this falls into that “it just needs to be competitive” bucket. I think we’ll see further Chromium and third-party work here, too.

And then there’s productivity. “Moving to a system powered by the X Elite isn’t sacrificing your ability to be productive,” Ryan writes. “Office 365 runs natively on Arm-based processors now, and the results on the Snapdragon X Elite demonstrate that not only is it ‘fine’ performance but that it is exceeding the previous generation Surface Laptop and putting in a great battle against Intel’s latest offerings.”

In short, this is all good news, great news in most cases. And as reviewers confirm—or don’t—these findings with their own tests and unique workloads and compatibility requirements in the coming weeks, we’ll have more data and can feel more confident in this platform.

For now, I’ll hold on to my preorder. And we’ll see what happens. I’m not worried per se, just vaguely disappointed, and not sure if this matters a lot or a little or not at all. But there it is. It’s not a complete undermining, but a chink in the defenses, unexpected and unwelcome.

More soon. I have a lot to think about.