Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 review: it’s never been better

Microsoft Surface Laptop 7

MSRP $2,000.00

“The Surface Pro 7th Edition is the best Surface device I’ve ever used.”

Pros

• Fast, efficient performance
• Display is bright, fast, and beautiful
• Excellent haptic feedback trackpad
• Port selection is solid
• Great starting price

Cons

• Battery life diminishes under heavier loads

I’ve always been a fan of the Surface Laptop, but it always had two primary problems: performance and battery life. For the price it was being sold at, it could never hold up against the competition. Fortunately, with these new Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips, those two issues are supposedly resolved.

Throw in some thinner bezels and a more affordable price, and you have the recipe for the Surface Laptop 7th Edition to finally live up to its true potential as a MacBook Air killer.

Specs and price

My review configuration was the 15-inch model, with the Snapdragon X Elite inside. It also came with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, which comes in at $2,000.

But the $999 starting price is what matters most, which is the 13.8-inch model configured with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The Surface Laptop 7th Edition (and Surface Pro 11th Edition) are the only Copilot+ PCs that hit this price, primarily because the other options start at with 512GB of 1TB of storage. The HP OmniBook X, for example, comes in at just $100 more for a 512GB SSD.

Remember that the MacBook Air, for example, starts at $999 but with just 8GB of RAM. For what it’s worth, Apple charges an extra $200 to jump from 8GB to 16GB but maxes out at 24GB. While the Surface Laptop 7th Edition can get up to 64GB but is limited to 1TB of storage.

Design

The Surface Laptop hasn’t changed much over the years, but this new model makes some minor tweaks that improves the overall look. It has slightly thinner bezels along the sides of the screen, as well as rounded corners. All of that goes a long way toward making the design feel more modern.

Both the 13.8-inch and 15-inch models are thicker than their corresponding predecessors. The 13.8-inch model is only 0.03 inches thicker, while the 15-inch model is 0.05 inches thicker. Not a huge deal, but these are already a bit chunkier than some of the other alternatives. The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is thinner, for example, as is the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.

The 13.8-inch has a slightly larger screen than in the previous version, bringing it in line with larger 14-inch laptops that other manufacturers have moved to. All in all, though, the 15-inch model remains quite a hefty laptop. The 3:2 aspect ratio makes this a rather tall screen, and therefore, a large footprint.

Lastly, the colorways have been reset. Gone are Sage green and the textured (and now iconic) Alcantara. Now, there are just four options: Black, Platinum, Sapphire, and Dune. They don’t have quite as much character as the previous options, but they offer enough variation.

The keyboard is unchanged from the previous models, which I’m OK with. The keycaps are a bit small for the layout, but the amount of travel is comfortable. The trackpad is where the larger improvement has been made. Microsoft has traded out the mechanical touchpad for a haptic feedback one, which feels much smoother to use. We’ve seen this in lots of high-end Windows laptops, including the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Studio — but never on the Surface Laptop before.

Not only is haptic feedback trackpad more dependable, it also can be customized to perfectly fit your tastes. I sped up the cursor speed and turned down the sensitivity, which landed me at a perfect balance. This is a huge upgrade, and I’m so glad Microsoft decided to bring it over, even on the $999 base model.

My one complaint is that the 13.8-inch and 15-inch devices both use the same size trackpad and keyboard. They look large enough on the smaller model, but the 15-inch model could have been bigger. In particular, full-size function keys would have been nice — perhaps even a larger power button with a fingerprint reader would have been nice. I would have also liked to see a larger trackpad, though that’s more for aesthetics than usability.

Display

I’ve always loved the 3:2 screen of the Surface Laptop. With most laptops sticking at 16:10, the extra vertical space of the Surface Laptop remains one of its calling cards, and whenever I come back to it, I’m reminded of how much I prefer this screen shape. It’s not just the size that I like, though. This is also the best screen Microsoft has ever put in a Surface Laptop. It’s incredibly bright, with a max of 561 nits, while contrast hits 1440:1 at that full brightness. That brightness is important, too — because it’s quite a glossy screen. I like Samsung’s anti-glare solution on its Galaxy Book4 series, and it’d be nice to see Microsoft try something similar, as reflections are quite apparent.

Some have complained that Microsoft didn’t include an OLED option — something brought first to the Surface Pro this year. As much as I’d like to see OLED offered at this price, I’m not going to complain too much when the IPS panel is this good. It even has a 120Hz refresh rate, a feature I was delighted to see that surpasses the 60Hz of the M3 MacBook Air.

Really, the only place for where there could be some improvement is in color accuracy. My colorimeter picked up a Delta-E of 1.27, which is a bit higher than some of the competition. It’s not worrying or disqualifying for photographers or designers though — just not as high as OLED panels.

On average, this is a superior screen to the MacBook Air’s — with the added bonus of it being a taller aspect ratio with touch capabilities built-in.

Ports

Both versions of the Surface Laptop come USB-A, USB-C, a Surface Connect dock, and a headphone jack. That’s a pretty solid balance of ports, though options like the Galaxy Book4 Edge add HDMI to sweeten the deal.

The only difference is that the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7 comes with a microSD card slot, while the 13.8-inch model does not.

Performance

If there’s always been one Achilles’ heel for the Surface Laptop, it’s performance. I’m happy to report that’s no longer the case. Now powered by the Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, the Surface Laptop 7 finally feels like the capable laptops I’ve always wanted it to be. Microsoft offers both the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus and 12-core Snapdragon X Elite configurations, though the 15-inch model requires you to go for the X Elite. But that’s not a bad thing, because this chip really is fast.

Let’s get this out of the way first: These Snapdragon X chips in general are faster than Intel’s current Core Ultra by a considerable margin. That includes single-core, multi-core, and GPU performance — so long as the app is running natively. Compared to Apple’s M3, meanwhile, they have faster multi-core performance but worse single-core and GPU performance. How that plays out in how apps actually feel in terms of performance will depend on the application, of course.

Breaking down into the individual Snapdragon X chips, however, you’ll see where this configuration of the Surface Laptop 7 lands. It’s relatively in line with the HP OmniBook X, trading blows in the benchmarks, despite that it should technically be slightly faster. The main differences we’re seeing in performance between these chips, however, is between the Snapdragon X Plus and the top-end Snapdragon X Elite X1E84100, which is only available in the Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 right now. You can see that laptop has solid lead over the Surface Laptop 7, especially in single-core and GPU. On average, it’s 16% faster across the board, which really is impressive.

Unfortunately, I don’t have numbers on how this configuration of the Surface Laptop 7 compares to the Snapdragon X Plus version. I would have liked to have been able to say for sure whether the upgrade to the X Elite is worth it.

One of the best things about the Surface Laptop 7th Edition (and the other Snapdragon X laptops) is its thermals. Although it’s not a fanless laptop, you might guess it is, as you’ll never hear the fans spin up. In fact, even during a 10-minute multi-core test like Cinebench R24, which represents an unrealistic workload, the Surface Laptop 7 never get overly loud or warm. You honestly can’t hear it unless you jam your ear up to the vents, which are located next to the hinge right under the display.

Speakers and webcam

Both the speakers and the webcam of the Surface Laptop 7 are passable. Neither are best-in class, but they’re serviceable enough. When it comes to the stereo speakers, which are hidden under the keyboard, you’ll find them adequate for watching YouTube videos or taking video calls. They somehow sound better than plenty of laptops that have four speakers and upfiring speaker grills.

Now, is there a ton of bass here? No, not exactly. The 15-inch MacBook Air still represents the apex of audio quality on this size of laptop, with its six-speaker setup and force-canceling woofers.

I wasn’t able to compare this larger 15-inch model against the 13.8-inch version, so I don’t know if the larger chassis allows for better audio quality. I do know that the Surface Laptop 7th Edition gets fairly loud without losing fidelity — I just wouldn’t count on them for replacing our desk or Bluetooth speaker like the MacBook Air does.

The webcam is closer to on par with what the MacBook Air offers though. It’s a 1080p resolution, so not quite as sharp as the HP OmniBook X’s 5-megapixel camera, but the image processing does a decent job brightening up faces even in dim lighting conditions.

Battery life

Battery life has been one of the biggest selling points of the Snapdragon X chips, promising up to 20 hours of battery life. That would put it in line with (or even surpassing) the MacBook Air — if true. There’s a significant caveat here, though, as that promise is only for local video playback. The Surface Laptop 7th Edition actually lasts over 22 and a half hours in my own tests, which is really impressive when taken at face value and surpasses the MacBook Air M3 in the same exact test.

The rub comes in battery life when there’s more taxing the system. In our web browsing test, which is also very light, that 22 and a half hours drops down to 14 hours and 21 minutes, which is around four hours behind the MacBook Air. That’s a better representative of what the battery life actually feels like to use in practice.

If you run a heavier load, even with some more involved multitasking, you’ll see that battery life drop even further, which is what I experienced when using the Surface Laptop as my primary work laptop. It couldn’t reliably make it through a full day of work without needing a fill-up. That’s not uncommon for laptops with my specific workload, but it does fall short of some of the high expectations I had.

Unfortunately, this is something we’ve seen in the other Snapdragon X laptops too, so it appears to be a pattern.

It’s the laptop I want to use

As I stated earlier, the Surface Laptop has always been a laptop I prefer when I’m actually using it. The larger 3:2 aspect ratio is fantastic, and I’ve always like the keyboard. The price, performance, battery life, and limited configurations always made it a bit of a nonstarter though.

The Surface Laptop 7th Edition fixes nearly every issue this laptop has always had. The performance and battery life are great now, and the improvements to the display and trackpad are the cherry on top. It’s not a perfect laptop, and there are still some areas where the 15-inch MacBook Air M3 surpasses it, especially when it comes to battery life and the speakers.

Either way, the Surface Laptop 7th Edition is the best Surface PC there’s ever been and the best of the current crop of Copilot+ PCs I’ve looked at so far. If you’re looking for a thin and light Windows laptops that feels premium in just about every way without getting as experimental as the XPS laptops, you’ve just found your next laptop.