Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 Review: Hello, Snapdragon X Elite

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The Microsoft Surface 7 laptop is a huge step-up from previous Microsoft laptops and puts Windows on a course to challenge the MacBook Air. But there's still some catching up to do in terms of performance and display quality.

The Good

1. Snapdragon chip does the job for light work
2. Premium design and feel
3. Solid battery life

The Bad

1. SnapDragon chip still lags behind Apple's M-series
2. Graphics performance is a touch disappointing

• User Ratings (20 Votes)
  5.1

Need-to-knows

• SnapDragon X Elite chip provides more than enough power for lighter workloads
• 120Hz variable refresh rate display and support for three 4K external monitors
• Battery life lasts about 18 hours depending on your use case
• Not quite as good as the MacBook Air but it’s getting there

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In June, I travelled to Taipei to see the brand-new Snapdragon X Elite chip in action.

This was a big deal. The X Elite has been billed as the chip that will finally see Windows-based laptops from Samsung, Microsoft, and many other manufacturers finally give the MacBook lineup a run for its money.

That means two things. These laptops need to feel as smooth as butter and have battery life that will sail through a day of use and be epic when the laptop is closed. It’s a tall order – particularly when the operating system is Windows and the amalgamation of hardware is totally out of Snapdragon’s control beyond their own ingredient.

Well, finally, I have a Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition sitting in front of me and – you guessed it – I have many thoughts.

How I reviewed the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7

To ensure I got the full picture with the Surface Laptop 7, I integrated it into my daily workflow as my main device. That meant, over the course of a week, I used the laptop to complete tasks like word processing, emailing, watching videos, light photo editing and video calls.

I took it with me wherever I was working to test the portability and charged it to full and left it overnight to test the stand-by battery efficiency. I wanted to see how this laptop performed as part of a typical user’s daily life so that’s exactly what I did!

Specs and pricing

The Surface Laptop 7 spec I’m testing is the 13.8” version with the Snapdragon X Elite chip, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. They opted to send me the Dune colour, which is best described as a rather attractive and not at all garish shade of gold.

This setup would set you back £1,449 (the equivalent M3 MacBook Air is £50 more expensive), but there are some other options to choose from. If you want to spend less, you can opt for the Snapdragon X Plus version of the 13.8” laptop which has two fewer cores than the Elite (10 vs 12) and slightly lower clock speeds. That weighs in at £1,049 and has 256GB of storage – the RAM remains unchanged at 16GB.

If you want more RAM, you’ll need to plump for the X Elite edition and spec it up to the maximum of 32GB. Storage options top out at 1TB, and if you want a bigger display, there’s a 15” version of the Surface Laptop 7 which can only be configured with the X Elite and doesn’t have a 256GB storage tier.

The most you can spend on a fully decked-out Surface Laptop 7 is £2,149. So, this is still an expensive laptop.

The rest of the specs are as conservative as you might expect for a mid-range machine. It’s powered by Windows 11 Home and has a 1080p camera, Wi-Fi 7 support, 2 USB-C slots, and one USB-A port. Charging is taken care of either via those USB-C ports or the proprietary port (which is easily mistaken for an SD card slot, I’m afraid).

Design and display

The Surface Laptop 7 is an attractive device and has more than a whiff of the prior-era MacBook Air. That’s thanks to the wedge design (of which I’m still a huge fan) and it suits the slim profile of the Surface Laptop 7 perfectly.

If you’re wondering – yes, you can even open it up one-handed, just as you can with all MacBooks and almost no other Windows laptop I’ve tested. Bravo, Microsoft.

It’s lighter than the previous generation and the build quality is, overall, very nice indeed. The colour choices are rather lovely, too – it certainly gives this particular Surface Laptop lineup plenty of character and wantability, which matters, obviously.

I’m a big fan of the keyboard, too. It’s satisfying to type on and roomy enough to never be annoying. Microsoft says it has included the “most inclusive touchpad on the market”, too. I have no idea what that means, but I do know that it has a haptic click rather than a physical one, and that makes it one of the most enjoyable trackpads I’ve ever used on a Windows laptop (most of them are utterly horrible).

Most importantly, you feel like you’re getting a lot for your money with the Surface Laptop 7, which is what matters. The only gripe I have is that the proprietary charging port could be a bit more MagSafe-like. But that might be taking things a step too far.

The display is great, too. It’s not as sharp and vibrant as the MacBook Air or Huawei MateBook 14, but it’s plenty bright enough at 600 nits and the 2K resolution is enough for most people. It also beats the MacBook Air with a 120Hz variable refresh rate and support for up to three 4K monitors – with the lid open! Oh, and I still love the fact it’s a touchscreen.

Performance

Microsoft is promising up to 86% better performance this time around, thanks to those Snapdragon chips. This is a promising start, on paper.

If you’re new here, I should confirm that I don’t do benchmarks. They bore me to tears. Equally, if I ran Geekbench on this machine, I don’t have the closest MacBook Air with which to compare the meaningless number it’ll spit out.

I care about how this thing feels in everyday use, and the Surface Laptop 7 feels super snappy, smooth, and fluid. That’s all I want, and it’s probably all you want if you’re seriously considering buying one of these laptops. I think that snappiness results from the combination of the Snapdragon chip, the 120Hz display, and the usable trackpad – three things I hadn’t seen combined on a Windows laptop until now.

So far, it feels like a MacBook Air (albeit running a completely different operating system, of course).

Battery life

Microsoft promises all-day battery life for the Surface Laptop 7, which amounts to 20 hours of video playback (22 hours for the 15-inch version).

That doesn’t interest me – nor do laptop battery tests. I’m far more interested in real-world usage and, in this instance, answering the big question: can the Surface Laptop 7 match the MacBook Air when it comes to battery life? My test, therefore, was to simply use the laptop as I would any other laptop. Email, writing, video conferencing, web browsing – all of the normal stuff that goes into running a business.

We didn’t get off to a good start. During the first morning’s use, the Surface Laptop 7 went from 100% to 75% in just two hours. By midday, it had chewed up half of its battery life (I’d used it for just two hours and 43 minutes, according to the Windows screen time report).

Then, things changed. I spent most of the afternoon shooting b-roll of the laptop with the display on, and the battery held up well. By 8PM that evening, it still had 35% remaining. It was starting to feel MacBook Air-like, and this trend continued for the next few days.

Whether or not it was still indexing during that first morning I’ll never know (Task Manager suggested it wasn’t) but now we’re into the groove, the Surface Laptop 7 appears to have the best battery life of any Windows laptop I’ve tested. It’s still not quite on par with the MacBook Air, but it’s getting very close.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, it passed the lid-down test perfectly (charged to 100%, lid down, left overnight, zero percentage points lost).

Copilot

I decided to ask Copilot how it classes itself. This was the answer:

I’m Microsoft Copilot, a conversational AI designed to assist you with a wide range of tasks and provide information. I don’t have feelings or personal experiences, but I’m here to help you with whatever you need.

It’s powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and it is, basically, ChatGPT.

Copilot works very well indeed. It even has a dedicated button on the keyboard, which reveals how serious Microsoft is about this – the Surface Laptop 7 is, after all, called a ‘Copilot+ PC’.

I’m just struggling to see the point at the moment, beyond giving you access to the undeniably powerful GPT-4 platform. If you ask Copilot what it can do for you, it reels off a bunch of helpful tasks such as answering questions, generating content, and providing recommendations. You know, just like ChatGPT.

There aren’t, as far as I can tell, any Windows-specific features built into Copilot at the time of writing. It even failed to give me the correct guidance on how to turn off the irritating focus assistant reminders in Windows 11.

As it stands, Copilot is a shortcut to ChatGPT. It’s nicely designed and immediately accessible, but I wouldn’t expect anything more. This is yet another example of a device manufacturer throwing AI into a product to ensure they can cover all of the corresponding marketing material with those two letters. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I will point to a poll I ran with my YouTube audience about AI on smartphones:

I guess that we’d see the same sentiment when it comes to laptops.

Is the Microsoft Surface 7 better than the M4 MacBook Pro?

In truth, the two laptops aren’t really comparable. The M4 MacBook Pro is a beefier machine.

It has the new M4 chip which absolutely blows the Snapdragon X Elite chip out of the water in terms of single-core performance; it’s about 40% faster.

The gap between the two is reduced when multi-core performance is brought into the conversation. Here the advantage for the M4 is minimal, only about 4% faster. But that is still impressive when you dig into the specs.

The Snapdragon has 12 high-performance cores compared to the M4’s four performance and six efficiency cores. Despite the M4’s hardware deficiency, it still outperforms the Snapdragon.

Graphics performance is totally dominated by the M4 chip too, in fact, the Snapdragon X Elite lags significantly here by about 50%. There are other things to consider too; the displays are virtually the same size but the MacBook Pro has a higher resolution.

The Surface 7 has two USB4 Type-C and one USB-A port compared to the MacBook Pro which has three Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports, an SD card slot and a HDMI port. Essentially, these are different laptops for different purposes.

If you need the assurance of some power, then the M4 MacBook Pro is the safest bet.

Conclusion

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 feels like a MacBook Air. I mean this both in terms of the hardware and the user experience. Step away from the competing operating systems for a moment and you’re left with two very well-made laptops that are buttery smooth in operation.

This is good news if you’re a Windows person, or you’re a Mac person at home but have some leverage over the Windows machine you’re forced to use at work. The Surface Laptop 7 is a solid option in both scenarios.

The Snapdragon X Elite chip in mine is doing a job and, I suspect, has a lot more in the tank than both I and the laptop itself can fully explore. It’s an exciting time for Windows laptops for that reason; the arm race is, clearly, on. The fact this laptop features the best battery performance I’ve ever experienced with a Windows laptop confirms this.

Copilot is ChatGPT – it’s as simple as that. There’s little to shout about beyond the immediacy and ease with which you can access GPT-4 directly in Windows. That’s cool and handy, but not as game-changing as Microsoft would like us to think. But, then, that’s been the case with all consumer-facing AI I’ve tried thus far.

We’re nearly there with the Surface Laptop, but it still can’t match the MacBook Air as a complete package. At least it now has the build quality, chip, and battery life to shout about.