Hands-on with Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop: It’s what’s inside that counts

Many of Microsoft’s Surface devices aim at something: a tablet. A mini laptop. A pull-forward design. The Surface Laptop 2024 (7th Edition) is less about the Microsoft hardware than what’s inside it — namely, a new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip.

Like the Surface Laptop 5, the Surface Laptop 2024 comes in two sizes, a slightly larger 13.8-inch (versus a 13.5-inch display for its predecessor) and the 15-inch model. On paper, the 15-inch model is a third of a pound lighter, but I didn’t notice a difference while lifting it. Both displays put out 400 nits, which is close enough to the 384 nits we measured the Surface Laptop 5 at.

All told, it’s another way of saying that the most recent Surface Laptop 5 doesn’t really offer that many obvious changes. It’s the same design, but with some tweaks; the touchpad hides the haptics found inside the Surface Laptop Studio.

Unlike the Surface Pro 2024, whose Flex Pro keyboard benefits from the haptic touchpad, the haptics here didn’t do anything for me at first touch.

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop has always attempted to offer a solid keyboard, a good to great screen, and good battery life. The latter’s sure to get a boost with the Qualcomm Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite chip inside. Microsoft quotes 20 hours of battery life on the Surface Laptop 13.8-inch and 22 hours of battery life on the 15-inch model, but that’s with the display tuned to 150 nits. We test at 250-260 nits, so battery life should drop in our future benchmark results.

This is a device whose benefit will be from the upgraded components, including the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor. My opinion is unchanged from the Surface Pro; I see nothing to disbelieve Qualcomm’s claims that the Snapdragon X Elite is on par with the Core Ultra, benchmarks aside. The UI is fast and smooth. Applications load extremely quickly. Scrolling and loading pages in Edge was surprisingly fast. If there’s a hitch or a stutter, I didn’t see it.

The key will be in how the Surface Laptop runs third-party applications, including benchmarks, since that was a major stumbling block for Qualcomm’s previous laptop chip attempts. Naturally, I asked to run a benchmark or two. Microsoft officials shut down my request to connect an SSD as well as download a benchmark like Cinebench, so I’ll have to continue to believe Qualcomm’s performance claims for now.

Given the large number of rival Copilot+ laptops that use Qualcomm chips, it’s clear that Microsoft won’t enjoy an advantage based on components alone. (Unlike previous Arm offerings, Microsoft didn’t co-design the Snapdragon X Elite.) We’ll have to see how it holds up under testing.