Microsoft has taken the wraps off the new Surface Laptop — an Arm-based laptop for consumers. It’s got one big difference from the Surface Laptop 6 for Business announced in March — it’s equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip instead of Intel’s Core Ultra, leveling the playing field, the company hopes, with Apple’s powerful and efficient MacBook laptops.
The new Surface laptop comes in four colors and 13.8- and- 15-inch options for its 600-nit displays. The company says it’s “80 percent faster than our previous generation” and offers “up to 22 hours of local video playback.” It’s got a haptic touchpad, just as Apple’s MacBooks have had for years. Unlike the MacBook Air, Microsoft said it will support three 4K monitors — on top of the laptop’s own display.
The new Surface Laptop also supports up to 32GB of RAM and comes with Wi-Fi 7, the latest 6GHz version of Wi-Fi. And the Surface Laptop sports a touchscreen — again, something Apple has yet to add to its laptops.
Microsoft calls the new Laptop a “Copilot Plus PC” thanks to a neural processing unit that will power Windows 11 AI features like Recall, an on-device feature that lets users search for information from places like apps, documents, and folders using Copilot. The company says only so-called Copilot Plus PCs can handle such features.
Microsoft says these AI machines will get Windows AI features before their Intel counterparts. Whether these computers can match or outdo Apple’s custom silicon remains to be seen, but at least when it comes to battery life, they should fare better than their Intel Core Ultra siblings.
