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...