Microsoft’s Surface lineup has long been a showcase for Windows devices, but recent iterations left some feeling the brand had lost its innovative edge. With the 2024 Surface Laptop 15, Microsoft aims to recapture that spark by embracing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip and the promise of Windows on Arm. While a bold move, it delivers solid results that look to only get better as the platform develops.
Unboxing the 2024 Surface Laptop 7 is an experience in itself. Microsoft has taken the time to make the entire package feel premium, even down to the box that matches the colour of the unit. The 2024 Microsoft Surface Laptop maintains the sleek, minimalist aesthetic that has become synonymous with the Surface brand, and it looks stunning.
Available in 13.8-inch and 15-inch variants—we reviewed the 15-inch model—the Surface Laptop 7 features an all-aluminum chassis that feels premium to the touch. The 15-inch model I tested weighs just 3.67 pounds, making it incredibly portable and sleek, although, for people who want to keep things as light as possible, the 13-inch offering is even better at only 2.96.
For 2024, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 makes slight design changes, evoking a more Apple-like feel. Microsoft has introduced subtle yet impactful updates to the design. The display now boasts slimmer bezels, giving the device a more modern look. The corners of the screen have been gently rounded, softening the overall appearance. These small tweaks result in a device that feels fresh while still being unmistakably Surface, and honestly, I love how it all comes together.
“The 2024 Microsoft Surface Laptop maintains the sleek, minimalist aesthetic that has become synonymous with the Surface brand, and it looks stunning.”
The Surface Laptop 7 offers a good selection of ports for an ultraportable device. You’ll find two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and Microsoft’s proprietary Surface Connect port for charging and docking. Unlike newer MacBooks, it also includes a USB-A port for legacy devices, ensuring you don’t need a dongle just to plug something in. Wireless connectivity is top-notch, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support. The Wi-Fi 7 capability is particularly forward-looking, ensuring the laptop is ready for the next generation of high-speed wireless networks.
The 1080p webcam on the Surface Laptop 7 is a welcome upgrade from many ultra-portable laptops, providing crisp video for conference calls. Windows Studio Effects can use AI to enhance video quality further, with features like background blur and eye contact correction, and it works well. It is not the best webcam we have tested, but it is far better than many webcams we have seen on ultraportable Windows-based machines in the past. It effectively takes advantage of features found on the Snapdragon X Elite chip to deliver a solid picture.
People who appreciated past Surface models for their typing experience will be happy with what Microsoft has brought to the table this time around. The keyboard remains a highlight, with well-spaced keys offering satisfying travel and tactile feedback. That being said, while I love most of the design this time, the new precision haptic trackpad is something I am still getting used to.
This addition brings the Surface Laptop 7 in line with Apple’s MacBooks in terms of touch input quality and feel, but as good as haptic touchpads are, they never feel as responsive as one that actually clicks. Thankfully, haptic feedback can be customized to your liking or turned off entirely if you prefer. Although it is a strange experience using it with no feedback at all, play with it and find the feel that works best for your needs.
The 2024 Surface Laptop 7’s 15-inch PixelSense Flow display is potentially one of the nicest screens I have used on a laptop in this price range. With a resolution of 2304 x 1536 and a 3:2 aspect ratio, it provides ample screen real estate for productivity tasks. The panel now supports a 120Hz refresh rate, which can be dynamically adjusted to conserve battery life when high refresh rates aren’t needed. It is also absolutely stunning, displaying vibrant colours and clear images that make the device pop while in use.
Peak brightness has been boosted to 600 nits, a significant improvement over the previous generation’s 400 nits. This makes the display much more usable in bright environments and enhances HDR content. The colour accuracy is also excellent, with support for both sRGB and P3 colour gamuts, making it a solid solution for designers and other creatives who use their laptops for tasks such as design, photography, or video editing.
Jumping over to the media experience, the audio performance is solid. The upward-firing speakers hidden beneath the keyboard deck in the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 provide clear, room-filling sound suitable for video calls and casual media consumption. However, for serious music listening or content creation, you’ll still want to use external speakers or headphones. The speakers will get the job done, but they simply cannot match the quality of dedicated audio hardware. They are more than serviceable for watching a quick Netflix movie or YouTube video while away from your living room and big TV.
This brings us to one of the biggest and most exciting features for those who want a laptop that delivers a true all-day battery: the new Snapdragon X Elite SoC. For anyone who does not follow laptop hardware news, 2024 marks the first year an ARM-based SoC is found in the full Surface lineup. This marks a significant departure from previous Surface devices, which typically offered both Intel and AMD options beyond select models that have dipped their toes with ARM, such as the Surface Pro X. While this is a risky move, it is the strongest push Microsoft has made to move Windows in this direction, and so far, I am impressed, although more on that later.
The Snapdragon X Elite in our Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 review unit features 12 high-performance cores capable of boosting up to 4.3GHz. It’s paired with a Qualcomm Adreno GPU and a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI tasks. The laptop we reviewed also features 32GB of RAM, making it an ideal test for seeing what Windows on ARM could look like in the best possible scenario.
This combination promises strong performance and excellent power efficiency. This is a powerful offering, especially for software developed for Windows on ARM. Thankfully, Microsoft has a new emulation layer built into the OS called Prism, which aims to bring the existing range of software to these new machines. While not a perfect solution, it helps bridge the gap as we wait for more ARM-native apps to make their way to market, although performance may suffer for these apps in the meantime.
With all that in mind, how does the 2024 Surface Laptop 7 actually stack up to the competition, and is there a major trade-off to experiencing Windows on ARM before all software is ready? In benchmark tests, the 2024 Surface Laptop 7 impressed across a range of metrics, including Cinebench. It outperformed many Intel Core Ultra-based laptops in multi-core tests and even gave Apple’s M3 chip a run for its money in some scenarios. Single-core performance still lags slightly behind the latest x86 chips, but the gap has narrowed significantly.
“The Snapdragon X Elite in our Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 review unit features 12 high-performance cores capable of boosting up to 4.3GHz.”
Moving past benchmarks and into real-world use, the performance is snappy and responsive, and it manages the core Windows experience very well. Native Arm64 applications launch quickly and run smoothly. The laptop handles multitasking with ease, even with numerous browser tabs, productivity apps, and background processes running simultaneously. Running 90 percent of the productivity software I use on a daily basis showed no real issues and provided a native or near-native experience as I went through my testing.
I will say I did run into some odd lag issues when using the X86 versions of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Lightroom Classic, with both showing off stuttering as I got things started. Thankfully, these issues went away after I used the software for a while, so it was not a major issue but something to take note of. I did not see the issues when using Adobe Photoshop or with the ARM 64 versions of Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, so thankfully, I could do almost everything I normally would do on my work laptop without any issues.
This brings me to my next point: The transition to ARM does come with some compatibility considerations. While the vast majority of Windows applications now run without issue thanks to Microsoft’s x64 emulation layer I mentioned above, some specialized software may still need to be optimized for ARM. Before making the switch, it’s worth checking if any mission-critical applications you rely on have native ARM support.
While productivity and creative software worked, gaming did struggle on ARM for the most part. The Adreno GPU, while capable of general computing tasks, is not equivalent to a full discrete GPU. That being said, if a game was capable of running on an integrated GPU in the past, provided there are no special requirements, the Snapdragon X Elite should be able to run it.
I tested a range of titles to see what the new Surface Laptop 7 could tackle with a playable experience, and the results were very mixed. If the game you want to run needs some sort of anti-cheat work, you will probably not be able to run it here. I tried a few titles that needed Battle Eye to function, and despite a few tries and some fiddling with settings, I simply could not get them to start at all.
That being said, I managed to run a range of games on the Surface Laptop 7, and they were indeed playable, though not ideal. Baldur’s Gate 3 ran well once I dropped the resolution to its lowest settings, averaging around 30 FPS, with higher frame rates in less graphically intensive areas. Games like Civilization VI worked well, although I did experience some random lag. League of Legends, Counter-Strike 2, and Counter-Strike: Source all had stuttery but playable experiences. To put it bluntly, they were not optimal by any sense of the word, and even when I saw good frame rates, they would nosedive without notice. Needless to say, I would not recommend it to anyone who plays online.
To be fair, Microsoft is not marketing the Surface Laptop 7 as a gaming machine, and I was pushing it through tests it was not built for, especially with games not optimized for the ARM-based SoC. We may need to wait and see what it is capable of as more games get ported to ARM. This isn’t to say gaming is entirely off the table. Less graphically intensive indie games and older titles run fine. I tested a few smaller titles like Limbo and Super Meat Boy, and they worked as you would hope. Cloud gaming services like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and GeForce Now are also viable options, leveraging the laptop’s strong CPU and excellent connectivity.
While gaming may not be the ideal use case for the new Surface Laptop 7, Microsoft is positioning it as a “Copilot+ PC,” emphasizing its AI capabilities. The dedicated NPU in the Snapdragon SoC is designed to accelerate AI workloads, enabling features like Windows Studio Effects for enhanced video calling and on-device speech recognition.
On this front, the Surface Laptop 7 did really well. How useful the AI features all depends on your use case, but I found the new Copilot system to be well-integrated and to work very quickly. It can help with tasks ranging from summarizing documents to generating images and answering complex queries. The on-device NPU ensures these AI features run smoothly without excessive battery drain, with some workflows not needing to go to the cloud to process.
The full Copilot+ experience is still a work in progress, and it’s worth noting that many of these AI features are still in their early stages. Their usefulness will likely grow as Microsoft refines the technology and developers create more AI-powered applications. For now, they’re an interesting glimpse into the future of computing rather than must-have features. They can be very useful provided you fall into the range of tasks it does, but that is limited currently. Recall—the new feature to help you find things you were doing in the past—is currently absent but is said to return at a later date, so I sadly could not test that for this review.
But this brings me to perhaps the most impressive aspect of the new 2024 Surface Laptop 7: its battery life. Microsoft claims up to 22 hours of usage, and while real-world results don’t quite reach that lofty figure, they’re still exceptional. In our testing, which involved a mix of productivity tasks, web browsing, and video playback at medium brightness, the laptop consistently achieved between 14 and 16 hours of use. This is a significant improvement over previous Intel-based Surface Laptops and puts it in the same league as Apple’s M-series MacBooks, something I did not think I would see from a Windows-based device.
For those firmly in the Windows ecosystem, the 2024 Surface Laptop 7 represents one of the best implementations of Windows on ARM to date. It offers a compelling alternative to traditional x86-based laptops, especially for users who prioritize battery life and productivity. That being said, there is a tradeoff with compatibility. While most things run fine if you are looking for the most compatible device that can run anything on Windows, that sadly still remains an x86-based laptop, at least for now.
Even with that said, the 2024 Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 isn’t just a good laptop; it’s one of the best examples of why Windows working on ARM is so impressive. The Surface Laptop 7 proves that ARM-based Windows devices can be viable alternatives to traditional x86 laptops, offering a balance of performance and efficiency that many users will find appealing. If they can usher in gaming, it would be a complete package, one I would recommend to anyone looking for a new portable machine.
As it stands now, if you’re in the market for a premium Windows ultraportable and don’t need serious gaming capabilities, the 2024 Surface Laptop 7 deserves a spot on your shortlist. It’s a glimpse into the future of mobile computing, available today, complete with AI features, amazing battery life, and solid performance, all wrapped in a stunning package that is sure to turn heads.
