Surface Laptop 7 Review: Snapdragon X Elite Gives Microsoft the MacBook Answer It’s Been Seeking

Microsoft has been chasing Apple’s prosumer laptop line for a decade, but it took a new Qualcomm silicon platform – plus some new and upcoming software from Microsoft’s OS team – to finally get there. The Surface Laptop is excellent.  

Beneath the Surface

Microsoft has been making hardware since the early 1980’s, but it first started competing with Windows licensees with the Surface RT in 2012. Back then, the goal was to build the market for Windows tablets that could compete with Apple’s iPad that first launched two years earlier. To do so, Microsoft turned to a pre-AI nvidia for a Tegra 3 using power-sipping Arm architecture rather than an Intel x86. Surface RT was a disaster. The Windows interface did not translate well to a touch-first device, few Windows apps worked on RT, and what did run was slow.

Microsoft eventually found its niche with the Surface Pro, an Intel x86 convertible that was useful primarily as a laptop replacement, with occasional touch use. Its success eventually inspired convertible copycats from other Windows licensees, which was good for Microsoft’s ecosystem even if it cannibalized a few Surface sales. Sometimes competing with your licensees works.

By 2017, Microsoft had accepted that it missed out on mobile, but it had a new problem: Apple’s success in phones and tablets was also driving the high end of the consumer notebook market to Macs. Apple was even making headway in enterprise, while Windows licensees were focused on high volume sales at retail and large corporate orders that prioritized specs and price, not design and refinement. To compete, Microsoft introduced the Surface Laptop, a premium x86 laptop with distinct design elements like excellent 3:2 aspect ratio displays, the best trackpad in the industry, and lots of attention to detail. However, Apple changed the game three years later when it began to move its Mac line off of x86 and onto its own Apple Silicon M1. M1 is a custom architecture that started with the Arm instruction set and offered unprecedented performance-per-watt, enabling MacBooks to handily outperform Intel chips, on battery, for up to 14 hours on a charge.

While Intel and especially AMD have improved their products – the Surface Laptop 4 15” AMD had strong battery life – Apple’s silicon group grew its performance-per-watt lead and the MacBook Air became the best-selling laptop in the world. The Surface Laptop couldn’t reasonably compete with the MacBook Air without addressing the silicon gap.

Fortunately for Microsoft, it had never completely given up on Arm, working with Qualcomm on more powerful SoCs (System on Chip) for its HoloLens headset in 2016 and the Surface Pro X in 2019. As Microsoft began moving towards an AI future, it turned to Qualcomm again.

New Silicon Architecture: Snapdragon X Elite

Today’s Qualcomm is diversified across IP, phones, automotive, and IoT, but it wasn’t always thus. One of the first phone-adjacent markets that Qualcomm tried to enter was computing, and it was not seeing much success. To help break through, Qualcomm acquired NUVIA in 2021 for its engineering talent. NUVIA CEO Gerard Williams was the chief architect of Apple Silicon before leaving to found NUVIA, and he agreed to take some of the Arm-based ideas his team was developing for datacenters and repurpose them for personal computing. The resulting architecture is roughly competitive with Apple’s base M3 in some performance-per-watt comparisons and has an enormous NPU for on-device AI processing.

Microsoft is using two different versions of the Snapdragon X platform on two different sizes laptops to challenge the MacBook Air directly. I am testing the top 13.8” model with a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite, 32 GB RAM, and 1TB SSD that lists for $2000. However, Microsoft also offers a 10-core Snapdragon X Plus in the 13.8” size that starts at just $1000 with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. That is a steal, and should offer a superb balance of performance, battery life, and price. All Snapdragon X platforms offer 45 TOPS of AI performance and are part of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program (see below).

The result is a strong performance and really strong battery life, not just in artificial benchmark suites and static video playback tests, but in real workloads. I took the Surface Laptop to my mobile test environment (a local kosher pizza store) for a productivity-heavy workday. While Edge and Chrome and Outlook and OneNote and Word and Excel were all extremely fast, the battery meter was sluggish. Editing and exporting videos in Microsoft Clipchamp – and having the display on high brightness – did use up a bit more battery, but it typically took six to eight hours of heavy use before Energy Saver mode kicked in for another hour plus. If all you’re doing is watching video or web browsing, the battery will last even longer – Microsoft claims 13 hours of web browsing and 20 hours of video playback. The system does have a fan and the bottom of the chassis gets warm, but it’s exceptionally quiet.

With Snapdragon X Elite you will not need to bring a charger with you for hybrid work scenarios, even if the workload is processor-heavy. This is the first Windows platform that's truly competitive with MacOS/Apple Silicon in this regard. In some ways, the Qualcomm platform handily beats Apple’s MacBook Air implementation; I spent much of my review time with the Surface Laptop 7 plugged into a docking station driving two 32” 4K displays and running a dozen open apps, two dozen open browser tabs, multiple 4K video streams, and forgot that I wasn’t using my Legion Tower gaming rig. The M2 MacBook Air only supports one high-resolution external monitor, while the M3 MacBook Air can support two, but only with the lid closed.

Geekbench 6 - on batteryApple iPad Pro M4 16GBApple MacBook Air 15" M2 16GBApple MacBook Pro 14" M3 Max 64GB HP Elitebook Snapdragon X Elite X1E78100Lenovo Slim 7x Snapdragon X Elite X1E78100Microsoft Surface Laptop Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100Samsung GalaxyBook4 Edge Snapdragon X Elite X1E84100
CPU single-core3846264928862415241828312913
CPU multi-core14608100972110613765139091449414145

Windows on Arm (Not New, But Might as Well Be)

This is not the first time Microsoft and Qualcomm have attempted to build a market for Windows on Arm architecture, but this is the first time it has a chance to be broadly viable. All of Microsoft’s productivity apps have been recompiled to native apps for Arm. All the major web browsers now have native versions as well. Many core creative apps from Adobe and others are either native today, or will be in the coming months. Finally, most apps that don’t have native Arm versions can run well in emulation thanks to Microsoft’s new improved Prism emulation layer and the raw horsepower that the Snapdragon X Elite platform provides. You wouldn’t want to buy a Snapdragon X PC just to run emulated apps – they won’t be as fast or as efficient as native apps – but it rounds out the experience so that long tail apps like music players, image viewers, and even the encryption apps I tried all worked without issue. There are still three areas of concern:

  • Gaming – The Surface line was always pitched as an all-around performer, not a gaming system, and as long as you are cross-shopping the Surface Laptop with Apple’s MacBook Air, it’s basically a wash. Like the Snapdragon X Elite, Apple Silicon is capable of excellent performance on games that have been optimized for it, but there just aren’t that many. Gaming is an area where Qualcomm, Microsoft, and game developers are a long way from fully solving. There are over a thousand games that are known to work (see worksonwoa.com), but that’s a fraction of what consumers want. Emulation is fine for turn-based strategy games, but for FPS, racing, and even RPGs, gamers demand performance that only optimized code and discrete graphics can provide. Windows on Arm also supports cloud gaming, and I was able to connect an Xbox controller over Bluetooth and play some AAA titles that way. Still, the Surface Laptop is not competitive with a Lenovo Legion Slim if all you want to do is play games.

  • Device drivers – Compatibility could be a problem if you regularly need to connect to unique printers, scanners, or lab equipment. However, I had no problems connecting to my Brother MFC-J995DW all-in-one printer, as Windows seemed to already have the drivers in its system. I was also able to download the drivers for my Fujitsu ScanSnap ix1600 and connect to it wirelessly on the first try. I was even able to plug in an old StarTech USB-powered external DVD drive to play a CD in Windows Media Player and watch some old DVDs from my collection using VLC Media Player.

  • Unique corporate, engineering, VPN, and creativity apps – The move to SAAS with web apps has made this less of an issue, but apps that have low-level access to the CPU and GPU for performance reasons may not run well in emulation or won’t run at all. Qualcomm has done a good job getting manufacturers and developers on board with the Snapdragon X platform, so this is a problem that I expect will largely be resolved over time as apps from Adobe, Box, and others get updated. For example, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and Lightroom are all native, and the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite is scheduled for optimization. For example, Adobe Premiere Pro didn’t run at launch, but just a few weeks later can now run in emulation, and a native version is expected soon.

Copilot+ PC

Microsoft launched its Copilot+ PC initiative alongside Qualcomm to great fanfare ahead of its BUILD developer conference last month (see Microsoft Reinvigorates Windows with Recall and Snapdragon). The Copilot+ PC program requires PCs to have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) with a performance measurement of at least 40 TOPS to handle on-device AI tasks without slowing down the CPU or GPU or killing battery life. The Snapdragon X provides 45 TOPS, and Microsoft has written its Copilot+ PC software and AI models for Windows on Arm to start, so even as Intel and AMD start shipping systems with 40-55 TOPS they won’t be part of the Copilot+ PC program until Microsoft updates it for x86.

The Copilot+ PC featureset may eventually drive demand, but at launch it is somewhat crippled. All Copilot+ PCs feature a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard, but the button and cloud-based AI assistant are not part of the Copilot+ PC program. The flagship feature, Recall, was supposed to use AI to watch everything you do on the PC and give users the ability to find anything that they have seen while using it. Unfortunately, Recall has been recalled to address security concerns with no clear release date.

That leaves drawing assistant CoCreator in Microsoft Paint, Live Captions, and Studio Effects in Teams video calls as the main AI-enhanced features.

When I tested CoCreator in Paint, it was fun, responsive, and barely impacted the battery at all. Microsoft CoCreator works on-device, is very fast, lets you start with a stick drawing rather than just a text prompt, lets you iterate easily, and it's already in a paint program so you can add text, layers, edit, crop, export, etc. The output isn't always what you want -- multiple times I couldn't get the AI generated version of an object to be centered and fully visible in frame, it refuses to make "an explosion," and …the usual image caveats. But it's so easy to iterate and change the amount of "creativity" that it can be a useful tool for creating graphics for PowerPoint decks, illustrations, and (in my case) report thumbnails. The good news is that there’s essentially no learning curve. The bad news is that it is missing many AI tools found on smartphones like object eraser, and it certainly won’t play any role in a serious creative group’s workflow – you’ll need Adobe Creative Suite or Figma for that.

There are also a small but growing number of third-party apps that take advantage of the Snapdragon X Elite’s NPU to power AI features on-device. For example, Zoom and Camo have Snapdragon X -specific image processing capabilities that run on the NPU for better performance without impacting battery life.

The Hardware

Microsoft’s goal with the Surface Laptop 7 is to offer a strong design-first alternative to the MacBook Air. At first glance, the Surface Laptop 7 looks nearly identical to the Intel and AMD Surface Laptops that preceded it. There are some small changes – slightly thinner side bezels, more curvature to the case and a bit more screen real estate on the 13.8” display compared to the prior model. However, the easiest way to tell that you’re on the new Snapdragon model is to check the keyboard for a Copilot key.

Build quality is superb, and while there are color choices for the anodized aluminum case, they’re all fairly subtle. The Surface Laptop 7 13.8” comes in Sapphire (slightly blue), Dune (slightly gold), Black, and Platinum, while the 15” just gets the latter two. Microsoft restricts certain configurations to specific colors, so if you want more RAM, you’ll be stuck with Black. Configurations range from $1000 for the base 13.8” Snapdragon X Plus to $2500 for a 15” with the Snapdragon X Elite, 64 GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD. The SSD is user replaceable, though it does require some disassembly to get to it.

The Surface Laptop 7 materials and specs are all chosen for balance: it has the second-fastest Snapdragon X Elite variant, not the top chip (that’s in Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 Edge). The 3:2 aspect ratio touchscreen has more space on top of the display for menus and toolbars; this is the shape you want for productivity. The panel Microsoft chose offers 201 PPI, Dolby Vision IQ, 120 Hz dynamic refresh rate, and at least 1300:1 contrast ratio. It’s no OLED but the 500 nit IPS panel is plenty bright and uses less power – achieving the balance that Microsoft is after. Like everything else on this laptop, the speakers are very good, but not exceptional; they lack deep bass, but they play louder than the HP EliteBook and Lenovo YOGA without distortion. Weight is a reasonable 2.96 lbs. for the 13.8” and 3.67 lbs. for the 15” model. Microsoft could have used exotic alloys to get the weight down, but that would have increased pricing and reduced sustainability, so ...balance.

Connectivity includes two USB-C USB4 ports, 1 USB-A, and Microsoft’s proprietary magnetic Surface Connect port, a 3.5mm jack, and a microSDXC reader on the 15”. The included charger uses the Surface Connect port, leaving both USB-C slots open, but either USB-C port can be used with any 39W or better charger should you want to bring just one standard on the road. The only real weak spec is the 1080p webcam; it’s not bad, but in an age of Teams and NPU effects, I was hoping for better.

Like all Snapdragon X devices, the Surface Laptop 7 has Wi-Fi 7. Like most, it lacks a cellular option; Microsoft will have a Surface Pro Snapdragon X Elite variant with cellular later this year.

Enterprises will be happy to see that there is hardware level security with Pluton TPM 2.0 and any type of user will appreciate Windows Hello face authentication.

The Surface Laptop 7 enclosure is made with a minimum of 67.2% recycled content, including 100% recycled aluminum alloy and 100% recycled rare earth metals. Packaging feels premium and entirely paper-based, minimizing plastic use. The paper and fiber packaging is made from 70% recycled content, and 100% of the virgin paper is FSC certified to be responsibly forested. Microsoft also uses several replaceable components and encourages self-repair with detailed guides. More like this, please.

Conclusion

Microsoft has been aiming at the MacBook Air for years, and thanks to Qualcomm’s latest silicon it finally has a device that, in key respects, is Apple’s equal. The Surface line has always charged a premium for design and refinement, and the top SKUs certainly align with that philosophy. However, the base $1000 model provides all the refinement, good specs, and most of the performance-per-watt advantages of the Snapdragon X platform at a bargain price. There are better devices for gaming or creative professionals, but the Surface Laptop 7 is an easy recommendation for those seeking a general-purpose laptop.

To discuss the implications of this report on your business, product, or investment strategies, contact Techsponential at avi@techsponential.com.

Silicon, Smartphones/ComputingAvi Greengart