Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Generation Preview

My Surface Laptop 7th generation is out for delivery, and I have a niece waiting in Lower Macungie, Pennsylvania to sign for it. Unfortunately, I don’t fly home from Mexico City until June 29, so I’ll have over 10 days to wonder about this expensive purchase.

In the good news department, I expect to receive at least one Copilot+ PC for review here in Mexico before then: HP is sending me an OmniBook X or an EliteBook Ultra–I’m not sure which–and that could arrive as soon as tomorrow. And Lenovo has offered me a Yoga Slim 7x for review as well, though I’m not sure yet where it will be delivered.

And so I wait. Impatiently.

It’s been awhile: Though I’ve always had mixed feelings about Surface as a product line, mostly because of the damage its done to the ecosystem with Microsoft competing with its PC maker partners, I’ve also conversely always had a soft spot for Surface. This feeling defies logic, as Surface has suffered from too many reliability issues and technical deficiencies over the years for me to recommend the products to others. But I do feel the emotional pull of Surface.

And I feel it most strongly with Surface Laptop, a product that fills an important if embarrassing role in the Windows PC space by providing us with what many want even if they find it difficult to admit, an alternative to Apple’s MacBook Air. And yet, I’ve reviewed only two Surface Laptops over the years, and both a long time ago, the original Surface Laptop in late 2017 and Surface Laptop 2 in late 2018.

Looking over these reviews again, I’m reminded of some things I had forgotten if not blocked out purposefully: Surface Laptop originally launched with the woeful Windows 10 S, a well-intentioned but ill-advised Microsoft initiative that face-planted immediately. It was further burdened by its Alcantara fur coating, an implicit admission that the product was just a basic laptop and Microsoft needed to differentiate it somehow. And it of course suffered from the same problem that dogged all Surface PCs over the product line’s first several years, a dearth of expansion ports, in this case just a Surface Connect port and a single full-sized USB-A 3 port and an oddly little miniDisplayPort for video-out.

And yet.

As noted in the title of my review of that first model–when the heart rules the mind–Surface Laptop has always been special. There are technical and usability accomplishments in its high resolution 3:2 aspect ratio display panel, still rare today, many years later. The keyboard was sublime, the best I had experienced to that day, with an ideal typing experience. Even the Precision Touchpad was terrific, and I struggle to this day, with nearly every review laptop I use, with how unreliable these components still are in most PCs.

But the real appeal of Surface Laptop, then as now, is more emotional than practical. Yes, the device has to function well as a PC, that’s the baseline. But what propels Surface Laptop above other laptops, what’s kept it in mind despite the Surface team’s more recent decisions to purposefully ignore me, is difficult to describe. It’s more a feeling or vibe than a sum of concrete, pragmatic capabilities. And it’s improved over the years. Microsoft added the larger 15-inch variant that I always wanted, and wisely didn’t burden it with the numeric keypad that few need. It modernized and improved the expansion port situation, and now offers a more reasonable range of options. And it dropped the Cheetos-magnet Alcantara, thank God.

And today, finally, Microsoft has melded the Surface PC I want the most with the Arm hardware platform I’ve longed for, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite. It took 7 years, but I finally have the Surface Laptop of my dreams. You know, assuming that it all comes together as I hope. Nothing is certain, and if history is any guide, I should perhaps rein in the excitement a bit. The only thing scarier and potentially less reliable than a first-generation Volkswagen car is a first-generation Surface.

So we’ll see.

I’ve written about this Surface Laptop at length, most notably in Thinking About Surface Laptop (Premium). About how I pre-ordered one literally the second that Yusuf Mehdi said I could, and how I later canceled that pre-order and went with a (much) more expensive configuration after studying the system requirements of the unfairly maligned and now delayed Recall feature. And how I had expected the Snapdragon X-based PCs, at least some of them, to be fanless and silent like the MacBook Air 15-inch M3 I bought earlier this year, only to be disappointed when I discovered otherwise.

As a follow-up to my MacBook Air review, I’d like to point out that my stance hasn’t changed on the PC vs. Mac debate. I review several to a dozen PC laptops every year, and have for over 20 years. In recent times, we’ve experienced a creeping enshittification of Windows 11 that I find deeply troubling, and I’ve watched as the reliability and battery life of Windows PCs has declined as Intel thrashes chaotically to find a foothold in this new era and keeps introducing temporary new hardware architectures. And yet. I still very much prefer Windows to macOS. And it is fascinating to me, and very obvious, that all these years later, for all the churn and change, it’s still true. I still prefer Windows to macOS.

And thus my hope for the so-called Surface Laptop 7th generation, and for Copilot+ PCs more generally–both are terrible names–is that they deliver. This has been misconstrued by far too many to mean “to beat the MacBook Air in every possible way, be it benchmarks or real-world usage.” But that was never the goal. I’ve written and said this again and again, but let’s do it again: All it has to be is competitive.

Competitive means different things. Better battery life, efficiency, and reliability than the x86 laptops I review today, devices that can be roulette wheels of uncertain experiences and problems. Competitive means it needs to be in the same ballpark as the MacBook Air when it comes to the attributes that combine to make that computer so magical. Silent or near-silent operation. Effortless performance. True all-day battery life in real-world use. And competitive means full compatibility with the apps and hardware I rely on every day. That last bit is specific to Arm, and it’s been a sore spot that I hope to be fixed with Snapdragon X. We’ll see.

The Surface Laptop I ordered is black because that was my only choice in the configuration I wanted. Well, that’s not true either: Because Microsoft doesn’t offer the configuration choices typically seen with bigger PC makers–though, to be fair, most Copilot+ PCs aren’t particularly configurable regardless of company–I had to exceed the specs of my MacBook Air. So the configuration I settled on is about as high-end as you can buy at the moment, with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD.

Much of the Surface Laptop experience is consistent with the past, like its 3:2 display (though it is, oddly, a lower resolution 2496 x 1664 than the 3000 x 2000 of the first few generations) and its anodized aluminum body and general design. But some is new, and modernized. There are more ports than ever before: A 3.5-mm headphone jack, USB 3.1 Type-A port, and two (!) USB4/Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left, and a vestigial Surface Connect port and micro-SDXC card reader on the right. Connectivity is modern, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Dual studio microphones, Omnisonic speakers (whatever that means) with Dolby Atmos spatial sound. A Full HD webcam with Windows Hello ESS facial recognition, but, sadly, no fingerprint reader. And a Microsoft Pluton security processor with TPM 2.0 capabilities.

And we’ll see. Not today. Not this week. But when I get home from Mexico a week from Saturday.

Before then, I’ll do something I don’t normally do, but these are trying times: I will pay attention to what others say about Surface Laptop 7th generation, especially the 15-inch version I ordered. It’s not just that I’m curious–I mean, obviously, I’m curious–but with no opportunity to use this PC in the short term, I have no choice. I spent a lot of money on this, and I need to know if there are any gotchas. So I’ll be watching along, like anyone else, from the cheap seats. I’m nervous but also hopeful.

And I will, of course, get some Copilot+ PC experience in the short term. And that will be useful, given how similar these PCs are all, a benefit and downside to Arm and Qualcomm. PC makers just can’t differentiate–or screw up–the internals as much as they’d like. Not yet, anyway.

I’ll have more soon.