Review: Microsoft Surface Laptop (7th Edition, 2024)

It's safe to say that Microsoft's Surface lineup has been directionless over the past few years. Rather than revolutionizing these Windows PCs with new and interesting designs, radically faster processors, or intuitive features, the company has been refreshing Surface hardware with minor spec bumps year over year.

The recent push with Copilot+ PCs has been exciting—especially alongside the announcement of the new Surface Laptop 7th Edition and Surface Pro 11th Edition. Could artificial intelligence breathe new life into the Surface name? The Surface Laptop has a bigger and brighter screen, thinner bezels, a higher refresh rate, a haptic touchpad, and an all-new Qualcomm processor to boot. I've spent a few weeks with it, and while it's a good laptop, the Surface Laptop 7th Edition isn't as big a leap ahead as Microsoft wants you to think it is.

Timely Touch-Ups

With the new Surface Laptop, you can choose between a 13-inch or 15-inch version (very much like Apple's latest MacBook Air models). Microsoft sent me the smaller size, which is now slightly bigger. The display still has a 3:2 aspect ratio, but the size has gone from 13.5 inches to 13.8 inches. With thinner bezels, the machine is still just as portable.

The 2K-resolution LCD screen is brighter, reaching a max of 600 nits (up from 400 nits on its predecessor), with a 120-Hz refresh rate to make everyone on the screen appear smoother. You can toggle on Dynamic Refresh Rate, which adjusts between lower and higher refresh rates to conserve battery life.

The screen is a nice upgrade overall. Movies and shows are vivid and sharp, even outdoors in broad daylight, though I do have to crank up the brightness past 80 percent when I'm under the sun. I didn't use it much, but the touchscreen was responsive whenever I poked at it. I wish there was an option to add a nano-texture or matte finish (like on Apple's iPad Pro), because the glare on the display can be distracting. My main gripe, however, is that Microsoft really should offer an OLED display option, especially if you opt for some of the higher-end configurations on this laptop. It offers it for the Surface Pro 11th Edition, so why not here?

Microsoft has finally upgraded the 720p webcam to 1080p, a bare minimum in 2024. You'll also have access to Windows Studio Effects, which uses AI to enhance how you look on video calls (more on this later). My picture quality looked sharp in my meetings, but I noticed it still struggles with lighting. Despite the abundance of natural light in my home office, the camera would sometimes cast a dark shadow before adjusting back to normal lighting conditions.

Another noteworthy upgrade is the new haptic touchpad. You can customize the feedback via settings depending on how intense you prefer the clickiness. If you prefer none at all, you can turn it off completely. I kept the haptic feedback at the highest intensity while testing, and clicking anything was super satisfying. I'm glad Microsoft finally added this feature.

Moving on to port selection, the Surface Laptop comes equipped with two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports (that's one more USB-C port than on its predecessor), a USB-A port, a 3.5-mm headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port to recharge it. These extra ports are handy because the Surface Laptop can now support up to three 4K monitors. I used it with an Asus external monitor and an Apple Studio Display. Coming from the MacBook Air, which supports only two external displays as long as the lid is shut, it was great to be able to keep the Surface Laptop open and add an extra screen to my setup in the process.

The aluminum chassis is fairly lightweight. At 2.96 pounds, it's slightly heavier than its predecessor, but it fits in my backpack and tote bags just fine, and moving it from room to room was no struggle. Gone is the Alcantara fabric option, but you have the choice between a few colors: Sapphire, Dune, Platinum, and Black. I got plain old black, but I highly recommend opting for the more fun Sapphire or Dune.

Smooth and Snappy

My test unit is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processor, but you can save some cash and go with the Snapdragon X Plus (the 15-inch model only comes with the Elite). Microsoft says the Surface Laptop 7th Edition is up to 86 percent faster than the Surface Laptop 5 and 58 percent faster than the M3-powered MacBook Air. Qualcomm, on the other hand, claims the highest neural processing unit (NPU) performance per watt is up to 2.6 times faster than the M3.

My benchmark results (from Geekbench 6 and the like) don't show huge leaps as these claims suggest. I saw small gains in single-core and multicore performance over Apple's M3 chipset, though I'd be curious to see how it stacks up against Apple's M4 (which is currently not in a MacBook yet). WIRED contributor Chris Null also ran benchmarks on the Surface Pro equipped with the same Snapdragon X Elite and found marginal speed bumps over competing Windows laptops powered by Intel's Core Ultra 7 processor. The results are good, the claims are just overblown.

Coming from the MacBook Air with M3 that I use as my daily work laptop, I didn't notice a difference in performance with the Surface Laptop (especially not a 58 percent bump in speed). Then again, nothing I do is particularly demanding. I mainly used this machine for writing (including this review), answering emails, responding to Slack messages, and Zoom calls. It has been smooth sailing, with no hiccups to report, regardless of how many tabs, windows, and apps I had open simultaneously.

Microsoft swapped Intel for Qualcomm, which means the entire CPU architecture is different—instead of x86, it's ARM. Developers have to optimize their apps to run natively on ARM, something we saw when Apple made the transition from Intel's x86 processors to its custom ARM Apple silicon with the M1 MacBook in 2020. The good news is Microsoft has an emulation software called Prism that allows Intel-optimized apps to run on ARM-based laptops if a native ARM version isn't available. Popular apps and services should be fine, but some third-party apps may run into issues.

I've used native ARM versions of popular apps on this laptop already, like Google Chrome, Spotify, and Zoom. I did run into an issue with Zoom where I could only enter meetings through a direct link because it wouldn't allow me to sign into my Google account (which meant I couldn't access it via the Google Calendar integration on Slack). I also downloaded non-native apps like Telegram and Slack, and those worked without any hiccups.

Arguably the best part of the transition to ARM is battery life. The Surface Laptop was tough to drain during a full workday. After about 6 to 7 hours of use, at 50 percent brightness, I still had between 20 and 30 percent battery life. I also ran a YouTube video playback test at 50 percent brightness and had about 37 percent battery life after 14 hours. This laptop should easily get you through an entire day (and then some) without plugging it into a charger.

Don't Buy It for the AI

A key marketing point for the new Surface machines is AI. The problem? I found it tough to integrate many of these new AI tricks into my everyday workflow. They also need more polish.

With Windows Studio Effects, a majority of the features, like background blur effects and Creative Filters, worked well. Eye Contact, however, did not. The feature is supposed to make it seem like you're making direct eye contact on a video call even if you're staring at the screen instead of the camera. When I had it turned on in a meeting, one of my editors pointed out that it wasn't working and instead made my pupils look weird.

CoCreator was a bit wonky as well. Built into Paint, it uses generative AI to drum up a pretty image based on what you draw and a prompt you type in. For example, I drew a dog with a birthday hat on (or attempted to) and then typed “dog with a birthday hat on” as the prompt. It generated a dog with a birthday hat, but its right eye was distorted. I also drew a birthday cake with strawberries and candles (again, as best I could) and typed in “a strawberry shortcake with candles on top." It crafted an image of a cake with only strawberries on top. It worked when all I typed in was “a birthday cake with candles on top.” I guess the less detailed the prompt, the better. It's also kind of awkward to use with a trackpad or mouse.

I also tried Live Captions, which gives instant real-time translation from 44 languages into English across video and audio calls or when watching a movie (which turns it into English subtitles in real time). I tried the latter. Russian is my first language, so I used Live Captions while watching an episode of my favorite childhood cartoon, Cheburashka, on YouTube. The translations started working almost instantly, and it was accurate, for the most part. Some translations weren't exact, but close enough. The issue is that it struggled to keep up with the dialog, so some translations were delayed.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed using the dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard. I found myself relying on the AI chatbot a lot more than I normally would if it wasn't there. I hope more laptop makers take note (including Apple); a dedicated button that's right on the keyboard makes it so much easier to start using Copilot.

But the only feature I could see myself using daily is Recall. It captures your activity as a screenshot every five seconds, allowing you to treat it as a memory function and ask your computer for details on anything you've worked on previously. Too bad Microsoft's initial implementation was a privacy nightmare, forcing the company to delay the rollout. It's only available as a preview through the Windows Insider Program.

None of these AI perks were game-changing in my day-to-day life. The Surface Laptop 7th Edition is a solid machine if you're after something lightweight and reliable with great battery life, and that's about it. Sadly, while the base price starts at $999 for the Snapdragon X Plus, this machine can get expensive. The 13-inch Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite (with 16 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes of storage) starts at $1,400. Meanwhile, the maxed-out configuration with the Snapdragon X Elite, 64 gigabytes of RAM, and 1 terabyte of storage costs $2,400.

You hardly need to spend this much if you just want a lightweight, portable Windows laptop. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, can get you nearly the same experience for hundreds of dollars less. If you're not loyal to Windows, the 13-inch MacBook Air with M3 is often available for $1,000 at Amazon. (It'll also offer support for Apple's Apple Intelligence AI features coming later this year.) But if you want a Surface through and through, this one will do.