Hands-on with Microsoft’s Snapdragon-powered Surface Laptop

The Snapdragon X Elite has finally arrived and, with it, Windows laptops that might be able to stand up to the MacBook in areas they’ve fallen well behind in. After a day with Microsoft’s latest Surface Laptop, I’m excited for this new future.

I’ve been a Windows user my whole life. For the most part, macOS has just never really grabbed my interest. And, every time I used it, I just disliked it more. It was death by a thousand cuts, really. But there was one thing that I just couldn’t ignore. Apple absolutely nailed it with some of the most important parts of a laptop, namely battery life. The switch to Apple Silicon made MacBooks more appealing than ever, to the point where I finally gave up on trying to stick it out with Windows and just bought a MacBook Air out of pure frustration.

But then came the Snapdragon X Elite.

Qualcomm announced its new Windows chipset last year with big promises. That was up against years of Windows on Arm promises that fell incredibly flat. Poor app support, underwhelming performance, and rough emulation just led to experiences that weren’t worth anyone’s time. But Snapdragon X Elite looked promising from day one, and continued to be compelling right up until hardware was finally announced.

That’s why I was so excited to try out the Microsoft Surface Laptop and ditch my MacBook Air after an experiment of a few months. And, after just a single day, I’m already pretty happy.

Starting with the physical hardware, the latest Surface Laptop is a stellar machine. The aluminum body is just thin enough and looks great in the “Platinum” finish I purchased – blue is obviously the best choice, but I’m going to put a skin on it anyway. The keyboard, haptic touchpad, and screen are all excellent. The keys have plenty of travel, Microsoft’s first haptic touchpad is easily just as good as the one in the MacBook Air I was previously using, and the screen is bright. The 13.8-inch size also feels perfect for travel, which was my main focus, and I’m always a sucker for having plenty of ports.

But there are obviously two key things that we all want to know about. Battery life and performance.

Given I’ve only been using this machine for a little over a day, I can only draw so many conclusions on both of these. But after a full day of work, I’m impressed on both accounts. From around 9:30am to 6:30pm, using the laptop actively almost that entire time, the battery went from 100% down to 24%. That’s outstanding given that wasn’t just watching videos, I was working with dozens of Chrome tabs, WordPress, and Photoshop too the entire day.

And on that note, performance held up really well throughout.

I didn’t get a single slow-down through everything I did over the day. Photoshop held up like a champ, which wasn’t a huge surprise given it’s a native Arm app. Almost all of the apps I run are native, too, including Chrome and Slack. The only ones that I ran into that aren’t yet native are Beeper, Lightroom Classic, and Steam. Steam and Beeper were both running the background most of the day, too. Performance on emulated apps is, predictably, not as good as native ones, but it’s not a deal-breaker. Lightroom Classic was my big fear here, but it worked flawlessly. I was able to edit photos and export them with ease and I’d never have known that I was using an emulated app.

I’m super happy with the Surface Laptop so far. It’s the machine I’ve been waiting years for. I’ll be using this more in the coming weeks and getting together a full review but, in the meantime, what else do you want to know? Drop a comment below on something you’d like me to test or a question you have and I’ll see what I can do.

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