Pros
- Beautiful, durable design
- Class-leading battery life
- Strong performance
- Awesome and accurate haptic touchpad
Cons
- No OLED option
- Upgrades get costly and don’t include dedicated GPU
- Your Arm-on-Windows compatibility mileage may vary
The Surface Laptop has always seemed like an unremarkable, overlooked sibling to the Surface Pro, Microsoft’s favored child who gets more gifts and attention. And while the latest Surface Pro 11 received a new OLED display option to go with its more versatile detachable design and pen support compared to the clamshell Laptop, the latest earned its place as a rightful co-headliner next to the Surface Pro 11 for Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PC launch. Earlier Arm-on-Windows efforts were plagued by lackluster performance and limited compatibility, with many x86 apps unable to run on an Arm-based system. But performance has improved, and so has compatibility.
Available in 13.8-inch and 15-inch sizes, the Surface Laptop 7 is based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor. We received the smaller unit with upgrades from the baseline $1,000 model that include the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite chip, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. These upgrades don’t come cheap — they double the starting price — but our test unit offers strong overall performance along with luxuriously long battery life that rivals that of a MacBook. And it boasts a sleek look and solid build that’s every bit as luxe as a MacBook Air’s.
Before taking the Windows-on-Arm plunge, however, you’ll need to make sure that any of your mission-critical Windows apps are compatible (or will be soon) with the Qualcomm’s Arm-based chip or at least run smoothly through Microsoft’s Prism emulator. And you must accept the fact that a discrete GPU is not among the Surface…
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