Microsoft – Surface Laptop – Copilot+ PC – 15″ Touch-Screen – Snapdragon X Elite – 16GB Memory – 512GB SSD (7th Edition) – Graphite

I was most interested in this because of the new SnapDragon Elite which is supposed to be as powerful as Apple Silicon while providing the same excellent battery life. This particular product also seemed to hit all my other checkboxes as well, which include a good keyboard, screen, touchpad, speakers, and build quality while being lightweight and thin. But does it live up to it? The answer is yes. Yes, it does. KEYBOARD: I have mixed feelings about the keyboard. As they were so close to nailing it. As the way the buttons feels is excellent. Good amount of actuation force, without being too much nor too little, with very strong bounce back, with solid click feel, and not very loud. It is also just the right amount of travel and does sound good. However, it appears they took the same size keyboard on their 13” and put it into the 15” instead of using the extra real-estate to give more full size keys. As the keys themselves are very small making it so you have to be ultra precise while still having the spacing between them to allow for bigger keys. Many of the keys are miniaturized. Like Up, Down, Ctrl, FN. I still type about 128 wpm so it isn’t bad. But it could have been great. Instead it’s just solid. TRACKPAD: I think this is my favorite windows trackpad ever. They are using something that most other Windows laptops don’t use but Apple has been for some time now with it being haptic. My only complaint is that I wish it was the same size as the MacBook Air 15 inch M3’s. As to me that is ideal for a machine of this size. This one just seems a bit small for the chassis. Which isn’t to say it is a small touchpad. Just that I would have liked it to be a bit bigger. BATTERY LIFE: I didn’t have a lot of time to test this out. But with hard usage I was able to get 8 hours before I hit 20%, which would have given me another 1 – 2 hours at least if not closer to 3 – 4. Currently with me doing a word document, some tabs open, along with one or two programs it is saying 12 – 15 hours left. I’ve used about 7% in an hour and 15-ish minutes. If we math that out it would equal 17.5 hours if I did my calculation correctly. It quotes up to 22 hours of battery life. Regardless, battery life is excellent as to me if I can get 8 – 10 hours doing essentially whatever I want anything more than that is just bonus. As that means I can leave my house without a charger and not worry about running out of juice. Finally, Windows has made it. You can charge via USB-C or the 65 watt magnetic charger that is included. It falls out easily, so I wish the magnet was stronger, and that the LED would change instead of being just an extremely bright white (which is very noticeable at night when trying to sleep. Apple does this portion better. But I’m glad to see it here as it opens up my ports. PERFORMANCE: I’ll keep this short and sweet. It is probably the best you can get in a Windows machine currently. To go a bit more in-depth. High Performance is going to be the setting you want to compete with Apples M3 and other premium laptop processors. It is equal, if not beating the majority of those in multi-core scores. Single Core is very good again other Windows laptops, but doesn’t beat Apple’s M3. A lot of what you daily is Single Core. The performance on/off battery is very similar which is a good thing. As the difference between other Windows machines is it is giving you the same power but with drastically better battery life. Compared to Apple’s silicone it is trading blows. It comes stock with 16 GB which is a good choice for the majority of users. SSD is replaceable. But I thought I read that voids a warranty? Will have to check that out further as that seem silly to me. The SSD speeds are good. Right smack dab in the middle of the performance. NPU I don’t have enough experience to give an opinion on at this time. It never got loud on my during normal operation. Most of the time I didn’t even hear fans. GPU was alright. Quite behind Apple M3. Wireless card was awesome. Best scores I’ve gotten on my network on a portable device. SPEAKERS: I was pleasantly surprised. They aren’t going to blow your socks off. But they are excellent FOR A LAPTOP. I could easily watch all my videos at 2x speed and still hear everything without problem. Got plenty loud. It does look to be firing out towards the screen and then back at you (very Apple like). More on the treble side, without a lot of bass, but voices still sound natural. Again, this isn’t like OMG amazing. But I have zero complaints. As they do their job well where I am not needing or wanting to reach for headphones. But if I was wanting to really get into something or listen to music I’d use headphones. As that would just provide a better experience. But for daily tasks and listening no issues. SCREEN: It’s excellent. I really enjoy 15” screens as they allow me to see a lot more and with bezels becoming smaller don’t take that much more room. The 16:10 ratio helps fit more stuff on the screen making productively excellent. The 120 Hz screen makes everything feel smoother and snappier. With it being LED it isn’t using as much power as OLED. But isn’t as nice. However, this still has very accurate colors, solid contrast ratio, and great white/black accuracy (meaning you can see a bunch of shades of white, same with shades of black allowing you to see everything in an image, but the blacks themselves are not perfectly black like on an OLED limiting the overall contrast level). It is also a touch screen which very accurate and smooth as well. With a very nice coating (similar to a smart phone). Outside of an OLED (which as I said has its trades) I don’t have any real complaints outside of maybe getting a bit brighter and supporting higher HDR. Which again, would trade for a hit on battery life so think this was a better choice. Which isn’t too say that the 400 – 500 nits isn’t at a very good spot. Reflections are hardcore (which to me is a good thing as that means sharper image) but may be a turn off for others. Resolution at 2496×1664 also is ideal. Making it not too much where you’re wasting power for improvements you can’t see while still retaining very clear picture. WEIGHT: It isn’t bad at 3.7 lbs. The MacBook Air 15 inch is 3.3 lbs. I would have ideally liked it to be closer to that 3 lbs. weight along with being a bit thinner. However, the trade there is that you get a fan with active cooling. Which should mean better performance and maybe longevity (as it will keep the components cooler which ideally means less wear and tear). Overall, it is a very portable machine that is relatively well balanced. My MacBook Air 15 M3 does feel better all around though in this category. BUILD QUALITY: Is excellent. All metal chassis. Buttons don’t wobble. Trackpad feels great. You can open the lid with one hand. Ports all feel great. I don’t hear any rattling at all. Hinge is stiff that it doesn’t wobble but light enough that it isn’t too stiff. It’s just right. I wish the rubber feet were a bit bigger like the MacBook Air. Also, the magnetic port could have a strong magnet as I find it way too easy to disconnect. Also, it would have been nice if the LED on the charger would have changed colors when charging and when fully charged. Instead it is a static white. PORTS: Are good USB-C x2 (USB4), 1x USB-A 3.2, and 3.5 mm aux. All on left side. Along with magnetic charger on the right with microSD card slot. There is a dedicated Co-Pilot button instead the right FN key. No dedicated play/pause function. But supports pretty much all the other ones. AI: They separated the Co-Pilot to be in a dedicated app. It can no longer change windows settings. Which is a good thing as that makes it a bit more secure than it was before. But also takes away some functionality. But that doesn’t use the NPU as that is in the cloud. Cocreate and Image Creator (found in Paint) are very fun to play around with. For basic stuff they actually work quite well. If you are trying to do something complex, it may not happen, or it may take a while with very specific prompting. The webcam features are great (include automatic framing, portrait light, eye contact, blur background, change background). All of those worked well. Shows a light on the webcam to show it is active. Webcam quality was solid (for a laptop). Microphone quality was very good (for a laptop). I would be happy to use this in meetings without any qualms. Live caption, works, but still has a long way to go before I would say it is ready. It missed a lot of stuff, was rather slow, and not fully accurate. CONCLUSION: It is with great pleasure that I can say that Windows finally has competition towards Apple MacBooks. As for so many years, Apple destroyed Windows just because they had better holistic machines, with good power, and most importantly battery life. I put this against my Apple MacBook Air M3 15” and both of them are excellent and trade blows almost across the board. To the point I don’t think I could declare a winner as it comes back to subjectivity of what you are personally looking for in a device. Any Snapdragon X laptop I can recommend from a power/battery standpoint. With the biggest difference between them being screen, build quality, keyboard, and trackpad. I think the Surface laptop nails all of them. With the exception that I would have liked to see bigger keys for the keyboard and a bigger trackpad. As both feel small to me even though there is plenty of room for more. But this trackpad from a feel perspective will be very hard to beat. Window Hello is excellent. Having an NPU will be nice. As it will speed up things that utilize it. However, much of that is still “in the cloud” and doesn’t make a huge difference yet. So, I wouldn’t be buying it for that feature alone. Or any of the AI features. But as laptops go. This is my favorite windows laptop of all time by a significant margin. You can’t go wrong with it.

Amazing display and battery life. DCI-P3 level better than MacBook Air.