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-cheerleade...