The Snapdragon processor and the Copilot+ designation have made it to the Microsoft Surface Laptop, and this new iteration of the machine is a serious challenger to the MacBooks, Lenovos and Dells of this world to be a laptop that’s all things to all people. When it comes to creative apps, there's plenty of processing power here, but it brings with it quality-of-life enhancements such as a long battery life and a well-put-together chassis as well as the inevitable AI apps that every software company is currently desperate for you to use.
Microsoft Surface Laptop 7: Key specifications
Design and build
Microsoft uses a smooth and sensible design on the Surface Laptop 7. It’s the kind of chassis that’s easy to slip just about anywhere. It’s thin but not that thin, and while it tapers toward the front it doesn’t come to a sharp wedge. The corners are well-rounded, the branding is subtle, and the black colour we received for review is more like a dark grey. It’s a very 2024 device.
You don’t get a lot of ports on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7. There are two USB 4 connectors, which is nice to see, and it can charge through them as well as via the Surface Connect port. There's a single USB-A, which hits the 5Gbps standard, an audio combo jack, a MicroSD card reader, and that’s it. If you want to hook up to an external screen you’ll need to sacrifice a USB 4 port, so those who use lots of peripherals will be looking into a dock or hub to go along with their new laptop. On the Microsoft website, a Surface Connect dock ($259) is available, but not listed as being compatible with the Laptop 7. Instead, MS offers a Thunderbolt 4 dock ($299) which connects to one of the USB 4 ports as an accessory. There's a Travel Hub ($99) too, but this doesn’t support charging. Why Microsoft persists with the Connect port instead of extra Type-Cs is a mystery.
The screen is touch-sensitive but isn’t an OLED - you’ll need to get the new 2024 Surface Pro 9 for that - it supports 10-bit HDR and has an sRGB mode alongside the more vague ‘vivid’. Faced with our colourimeter, the Surface Laptop 7 sang like a peacock, delivering 98% of sRGB, 72% of Adobe RGB, and 73% of P3 with a maximum brightness of 573 nits - not far off the claimed 600-nit level.
Features
This is one of the first laptops we’ve seen running on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, which have more in common with Apple’s M chips and even the processor in your phone than they do with the traditional X86 PC chips. Using the laptop, you’d never know it. Apart from the emphasis on AI and the possibility of Windows Recall being released at some point in the future, all the differences between this and any other laptop come down to software.
At the time of writing, Adobe has released ARM-native versions of some of its Creative Cloud apps, but not all of them. After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro and Media Encoder are still on the ‘coming soon’ list, though there are beta versions of all these apps that will run using an emulator. There's also no version of Lightroom Classic available, although cloud-based Lightroom itself can be installed. Curiously, when we installed Photoshop on the Surface to test its denoising abilities on a raw file, Camera Raw refused to open. Adobe’s Neural Filters and denoising aren’t yet optimised for the NPU in Snapdragon chips, so are using the GPU, which is something that can only improve over time.
Elsewhere, the Affinity apps are ARM-native as of their 2.5 update, but Cinema 4D 2024 only lists Intel and AMD CPUs on its PC specs list. DaVinci Resolve’s magic masking and NeuralMix in djay Pro are NPU-accelerated, but remain a rarity.
No Copilot+ PC has been released yet with anything other than the Snapdragon processor with an Adreno GPU. This means you won’t find one with more than 12 processor cores (yet) and a big Nvidia GPU (again, yet), which probably rules them out for anyone looking at rendering workloads or 3D gaming.
Of the AI apps, CoCreator in Paint is an interesting idea - you put in a prompt as you would with an AI image creator, but then begin to draw and the system produces a drawing based on what you’re sketching that you can then integrate into your composition. This probably works best if you can actually draw, and know how to use Paint to the best of its capabilities. Windows Recall, the potentially privacy-busting feature that allows you to search back through everything you’ve done on the PC, is still a Windows Insider feature at the time of writing with a preview available in October 2024, which will be installed from Windows Update if you want to try it out. "Security continues to be our top priority," reads an MS blog post, "and when Recall is available for Windows Insiders in October we will publish a blog with more details".
Windows Studio Effects allow easier background removal and creative filters on video calls, while eye-contact can be retained with the camera even though you’re looking away - something Nvidia already does and which can look uncanny at times. At the moment, software support is a mixed bag, and there might be a way to go before everything is up and running in the way the various software companies want.
Benchmarks
Performance
The problem with benchmarking these modern Snapdragon processors is that some of the benchmarking software won’t run. We can install a special version of the Cinebench 2024 test, but it’s not compatible with the Adreno GPU, which would be a useful metric to have. Likewise, the PC Mark 10 Home test won’t run, so we’ve used the Applications one instead. Any gaming benchmarks are out - when asked about gaming on the Surface, Microsoft told us to stream using the Xbox app - and Blender doesn’t support the GPU.
Still, we can gather some useful data to see how it stacks up against the usual Intel and AMD suspects, and perhaps most saliently, Apple Silicon. An interesting quirk of the Surface is that, in Windows’ power settings, you’re usually offered a choice between low-power, balanced, and performance modes. Not here: the Surface offers Recommended, Better Performance, and Best Performance modes. With the Surface Laptop 7 in Best Performance mode, it scores 2291 in Geekbench 6’s single-core CPU test and 13295 in the multi-core CPU test. Compare that with the M3 in the MacBook Air 15in, which scores 3075 and 12079, and you can see that the Mac is ahead in single-core performance but behind in multi, which makes sense when you remember that the Snapdragon is a 12-core chip and the M3 has only eight. More is always better, and even the older M1 Max, with 16 cores, pulls ahead in the multi-core arena, scoring 20925.
An Intel Core i9 - specifically the 14900HX in the monstrous Acer Predator Helios 18 - scores 2962 and 17498 in the Geekbench tests, which puts the 24-core chip with a cooling system like a tornado ahead of the slimmer, quieter Surface that has a battery life twice as long.
The Surface Laptop 7 encoded our test video file in Handbrake almost a minute faster than the M3, however, which will add up to a decent time saving if that’s something you do often. It was while processing this video file that we became most aware of the Surface Laptop’s fans, which make a soft sound that’s easy to lose in background noise.
And speaking of battery life, the endurance of the new Surface Laptop is something Microsoft has been yelling about, claiming up to 20 hours of use if all you’re using it for is video playback. Doing that keeps the screen on but isn’t particularly demanding on the processor, but even if you’re using it for more than that you can expect all-day use out of a charge. The applications test in PC Mark 10 gave us a final figure of 9h 21m of constant use (with the screen at 50% brightness and the machine in Best Performance mode), which is more than enough for a day if you’re letting it go to sleep occasionally or use the Recommended power plan.
Price
The Surface Laptop 7 is priced from £1,049/$999 so it starts at MacBook Air money and can be specced up, with 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, into MacBook Pro price territory. For the money you’re getting a very nice laptop - it looks professional and has both the performance and battery life to make it through a working day - but there are also other attractive prospects in this price bracket.
Who is it for?
The new Surface Laptop is for anyone looking for a laptop - as long as you don’t want to play games on it. GPU support for the Snapdragon processors is likely coming - these are the first generation of these laptops and we can expect improvements to come in the form of software updates - but for now, if you’re considering a MacBook Air or other machine in that price range, then this should definitely go on your list.
Should I buy it?
Buy it if:
• You want easy all-day battery life
• The new AI tools intrigue you
• You want the latest thing
Don’t buy it if:
• You’re interested in rendering or gaming
• But have little interest in AI
• You use X86-only (for now) software
