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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.

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Hands-on with the Surface Laptop on Arm
Hands-on with the Surface Laptop on Arm

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.

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.

Recall on a Surface Laptop.Recall on a Surface Laptop.
Recall is accessible via a shortcut in the lower right of the screen.
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

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.

Microsoft Surface laptopMicrosoft Surface laptop
Looking good in a cool blue.
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

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.

Surface laptopSurface laptop
Two USB-C ports, one USB-A port, and a headphone jack.
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

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.

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