The Surface Laptop for non-business types is here, and Microsoft hopes that after four years of Apple Silicon, its new Arm-based “Copilot Plus PC†has a shot at MacBooks.
Technology
Hands-on with the Surface Laptop on Arm
The 7th edition Surface Laptop comes with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite Arm chip and is one of the first Copilot Plus PCs, optimized for AI tasks.
The sapphire and slightly pink dune color options are fetching in person, and the 13.8-inch screen size feels generous for the machine’s small footprint. I spent a few minutes playing around with the new Recall feature, which lets you search for things you were looking at on your computer — whether they were in an email, on a website, or in a slide deck. AI-powered search helps you find the right information and presents it in a kind of everything-timeline so you can (hopefully) find the info you’re after and see it in its context. Honestly, it looks like a super useful feature I could use, like, yesterday.
Announced at Microsoft’s Surface AI event today, the latest generation Surface Laptop comes equipped with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Plus or Elite, a 10 (or 12)-core Arm chip that Microsoft believes will make Windows laptops competitive with Apple Silicon-powered, energy-efficient MacBooks. One way Qualcomm means to set the Snapdragon X apart is in its core makeup — the company says its chip is all performance cores. Apple and Intel both use a mix of lower-performing “efficiency†cores and performance cores to divvy up tasks and save battery.
The Surface Laptop starts at a base 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD Snapdragon X Plus processor, and can be configured all the way up to a Snapdragon X Elite processor, 64GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. It goes on sale June 18th starting at $999.99 (13.8-inch) or $1,199.99 (15-inch), with preorders starting today.
Correction, May 20th: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the base storage in the new Surface Laptop. It starts at 256GB, not 512GB.