I’m a laptop reviewer, and my daily carry from 2024 is $200 off today

I’ve reviewed many of the best laptops of 2024 so far, including all the available MacBooks. But my personal daily carry has been the Surface Laptop 7th Edition since the day I reviewed it. It’s everything I’d wanted Windows laptops to become — a true answer to the domination of Apple over the past four years.

The best part? As one of the best Black Friday deals I’ve seen, it’s on sale today for $200 off over at Amazon. This is the perfect configuration for this type of device too, coming with some extra storage. Even among the very best Black Friday laptop deals you’ll find this week, this Surface Laptop discount feels significant.

Amazon lets you configure it with the base 256GB of storage, but they’re only charging an extra $50 to upgrade to 512GB, which is definitely worth it. The configuration with the highest reduction in price, however, is the more powerful SnapdragonX Elite model, which is 29% off, down from $1,400 to just $999.

Here are the complete specs for the Surface laptop 7th Edition 13.8 that Amazon has on sale for Black Friday.

So, why’s this laptop such a big deal? Well, for years, Windows laptops seemed hopeless to compete against the MacBook. After the launch of Apple’s M1 chip in 2020, the entire PC ecosystem has been attempting to regain its footing. And as good as some of those laptops have been, they were hard to recommend when a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro had over double the battery life and, in many cases, better performance.

But in 2024, the tides began to turn. And the Surface Laptop 7th Edition is the cream of the crop of this new era for Windows laptops. It represents the best of what the Windows ecosystem can produce as a rebuttal to Apple.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always wanted to like this laptop. I love the 3:2 aspect ratio screen, the clean design, and great keyboard. Performance and battery life always suffered though, making it hard to recommend over a MacBook.

The key to this latest model’s success, of course, is the Snapdragon Elite X chip inside. Don’t let Windows on Arm scare you off, though — it’s amazing how power-efficient this little chip is. The result is fantastic performance and really impressive battery life. My own testing produced 22 hours of battery life in video playback, and while that’s not a normal workload, it’s still insanely long. It drops in battery life a little bit faster than a MacBook on heavier loads, but it’s still a huge leap over previous generations.

But really, the great performance and battery life was just a way of allowing me to really love all the other good things about this device. Very few laptops have stuck to using a taller 3:2 aspect ratio (compared to 16:10, which is what is commonly used), and whenever I come back to it, I find the extra vertical screen real estate really luxurious. I even really like the rounded corners of the screen and quality-of-life improvements like the haptic feedback trackpad and 120Hz refresh rate screen.

As someone who has options for what laptop I pick up and use — this is the one I kept coming back to time and time again through the year. $200 is a pretty big deal for a laptop of this caliber, so pick it up while it lasts.