Foreign journalists began to share their impressions of the 2024 Surface Laptop.
Overall, all reviews about the device are very positive. Not without its downsides, but they are quite insignificant.
Let’s find out what they said about the main “MacBook Air killer”.
1. Edge
It may lose somewhere in terms of performance, but the gap is small. And it works just as long
One of the first to talk about the laptop was The Verge. Below are key excerpts from the original text.
Inside and out, Microsoft has made a lot of changes to the 7th generation Surface Laptop. Laptops became very cool, but there was no total redesign. The most noticeable benefit is the slightly larger 13.8-inch LCD display, which now has smaller bezels on the sides and top. The screen has rounded corners, supports HDR with Dolby Vision and a refresh rate of up to 120Hz.
Glad those bezels have finally been removed, but I wish there was some kind of anti-glare coating on this one.
Microsoft has also managed to integrate an updated 1080p front-facing camera into the top of the display without the need for a notch underneath. The image she spoke turned out to be a good note on the laptop – so much so that a friend even asked me what camera I was using during a video call.
The trackpad now has finely tuned haptic feedback. It works so well that after switching to the previous generation, I got the impression that the trackpad was broken there.
The keyboard is basically the same as previous Surface models, with the exception of the new Copilot key. It’s the first big change to Windows keyboards in 30 years, but all it does is launch the Progressive Web App (PWA) Copilot.
Native apps like Chrome run great on the Surface Laptop. The Surface Pro X has always been underpowered, but Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Plus and Elite processors deliver the responsiveness you’d expect from a modern laptop.
However, not everything is perfect. Adobe doesn’t have Premiere Pro ready for ARM64 yet, so it blocked Premiere Pro from being installed on the X Elite, but forgot to do the same for the X Plus. This will lead me to protest the heavy application with the updated Microsoft Prism emulator.
This is a new key
I tried to edit a 20-second video file in 4K and the interface froze and dropped frames intermittently. I even gave up trying to export the file as it was slow to load and took at least 5 minutes to complete. I ran the same export on my gaming PC with an RTX 4090 and an Intel Core i9-14900K, and it exported the movie in seven seconds.
As for benchmarks, here too everything depends on the presence of ARM64 applications. So, tests were run in Blender, but the 3D application was not supported by the Snapdragon X Plus or the X Elite GPU, so the rendering completed much more slowly.
The 3DMark test was also emulated on the Surface Laptop, so the MacBook Air M3 was able to beat it by more than 30%. The older Cinebench R23 only ran emulation on the Surface Laptop, but the 15-inch model with the X Elite still beat the 15-inch MacBook Air M3 by about 8% in the multi-core test.
Microsoft claims its Copilot Plus line of PCs will be “58% faster than the MacBook Air M3,” but that’s based on tests like Cinebench 2024. In those, I saw 55% faster performance on the 15-inch Surface Laptop in View with the 15-inch MacBook Air M3 in a multi-core test.
At the same time, in a Microsoft laptop at high power the fan can already be heard. However, it does not make any unbearable noise, and the body hardly gets hot.
I’ve been using the 13-inch model mostly for the past week and the battery life has been phenomenal. On the first day, I worked outside with 100 percent brightness, downloaded a few games on Steam, made video calls, and worked regularly in Photoshop. I managed to get about seven hours of battery life on this difficulty.
Then, in the evening, after charging the battery, I used the Surface Laptop at 50 percent brightness for about four hours and it only drained 25 percent. I closed the lid at 11pm with 72% battery and turned on the laptop at noon the next day. It started instantly and then there was still 70% charge left.
2. ZDNet
It beat my MacBook Air on other points.
The editors of ZDNet were deeply impressed by the device. Here impressions appear from a completely different angle.
1. Better AI features for mobile devices.
Much of the AI functionality is easily integrated into Microsoft applications such as Word, Paint and Teams. Instead, to link services to me through a voice window and automation, AI services to clean up text documents, create images, and apply video filters always happen with a click from me.
It is very convenient to have access to the voice assistant through the keyboard, voice and taskbar.
Perhaps the biggest driver of these new Copilot+ AI features is that they run on-device – based on local data, providing more private, secure and faster processing capabilities.
2. Windows Hello is faster than ever.
One thing I always do when preparing any laptop, phone or tablet is to check how quickly the device wakes up and unlocks using the face indicator. If a device like a MacBook Air or Pro doesn’t support facial recognition, I judge speed based on the fingerprint sensor.
Comparing my M3 MacBook Air to a Surface Laptop isn’t entirely fair. However, after setting up Windows Hello, which uses the laptop’s infrared camera and front-facing camera, I believe I’m experiencing a new level of convenience. This is much faster than waiting for the laptop to boot and then entering your password or fingerprint.
The best part is that Windows Hello automatically triggers when I open the laptop’s lid, and it can scan my face even in dimer conditions thanks to the IR camera.
3. Touch screen support.
Like Windows Hello, touchscreen support has always been a key advantage that Microsoft Surface laptops (and other Windows PCs) have had over MacBooks, but the feature makes a noticeable difference in the twenty Copilot+ PCs.
For example, Paint’s new Cocreator tool requires you to write a prompt to generate an image and draw a basic sketch for Copilot to work. I usually struggled with drawing circles and laying out lines on the trackpad, but I didn’t need to do that on the Surface Laptop. Instead, I just moved the laptop towards me and started drawing with my finger.
Of course, this feature is more suitable for large laptops. But when my typing space is limited, like on a bus, on a plane, or in a complex café, being able to just reach and tap, swipe, and move things around on the screen is very useful and intuitive.
Bonus. Performance tests of the MacBook Air M3 and the new Surface Laptop:
Based on the tests above, the new Surface Laptop is faster than the MacBook Air M3 in some graphics benchmarks and multi-core mode. However, when folded, others may lose.
Bottom line: laptop performance has increased. It all depends on the situation.
Source: Iphones RU
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
