Surface Pro 11 and Laptop 7 review: An Apple Silicon moment for Windows

July 3, 2024

Familiar on the outside

Enlarge / The Surface Laptop 7 (left) and Surface Pro 11 (right) are either similar or identical to their Intel-powered predecessors on the outside. Andrew Cunningham

When Apple released the first couple of Apple Silicon Macs back in late 2020, the one thing the company pointedly did not change was the exterior design. Apple didn’t comment much on it at the time, but the subliminal message was that these were just Macs, they looked the same as other Macs, and there was nothing to worry about.
Microsoft’s new flagship Surface hardware, powered exclusively by Arm-based chips for the first time rather than a mix of Arm and Intel/AMD, takes a similar approach: inwardly overhauled, externally unremarkable. These are very similar to the last (and the current) Intel-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop designs, and in the case of the Surface Pro, they actually look identical.
Both PCs still include some of the defining elements of Surface hardware designs. Both have screens with 3:2 aspect ratios that make them taller than most typical laptop displays, which still use 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratios. Those screens also support touch input via fingers or the Surface Pen, and they still use gently rounded corners (which Windows doesn’t formally recognize in-software, so the corners of your windows will get cut off, not that it has ever been a problem for me).

Both devices have face-scanning webcams for Windows Hello authentication, usable for logging into your system, activating passkeys in your browser, and (when it’s available) unlocking the Recall feature, among other things. And each continues to include a Surface Connect port and a Surface Connect charger by default, though the USB-C ports on both devices work equally well for charging, and I’ve used USB-C chargers with these laptops pretty much exclusively outside of performance testing. (If you wonder why Microsoft is still using Surface Connect, consider how rapturously received the return of the Mac’s MagSafe charging port was. Surface Connect is fussier than MagSafe, but they’re conceptually similar).
The main takeaway is that, like using the earliest M1 Macs, the experience of using Snapdragon X-powered Arm PCs is mostly indistinguishable from using any other recent Surface device as long as you don’t trip over app compatibility problems. More on that in a bit.
Of the two machines, I find myself gravitating toward the Surface Laptop far more than the Surface Pro 11, but that’s because my computer usage is weighted heavily in the direction of keyboard-and-trackpad input, and I prefer the larger screen and more stable base. The Surface Pro remains a usable laptop design, and its best selling point as a tablet remains its built-in kickstand.
But Windows’ gradual retreat from tablet-y features—the retirement of a tablet UI in Windows 11, the pending death of the Windows Subsystem for Android, and a continuing dearth of truly touch-optimized native Windows apps—means that unless you do a lot of drawing or note-taking with the Surface Pen, the Laptop would be the system I’d get. Not that the Surface Pro is bad; it’s pretty, well-constructed, and functional. But the basics of this PC were designed around Windows 8, and there are just things about it that make less sense to me when running Windows 11.

Surface Laptop 7

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The 15-inch M3 MacBook Air (left) and the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7 (right), which feel so similar that I regularly found myself reaching for Mac keyboard shortcuts on the Surface. That’s not a bad thing.

Andrew Cunningham

The Surface Laptop 7.

Andrew Cunningham

The keyboard feels great, the trackpad is a bit smaller than the MacBook Air’s (but the MacBook Air’s is also huge, so the Surface’s still ends up feeling normal-sized).

Andrew Cunningham

The Laptop still has a headphone jack; the Surface Pro does not.

Andrew Cunningham

The Surface Laptop remains a by-the-book aluminum notebook. It’s so similar to the M2/M3 MacBook Air in both look and feel that, for the first couple of days of using it, I regularly found myself trying to use Mac keyboard shortcuts because my brain hadn’t fully internalized that I wasn’t using a MacBook. I like that MacBook Air design very much, so this is mostly a compliment, especially regarding the keyboard; if anything, Microsoft’s feels a little firmer and more satisfying than Apple’s, though they’re very similar overall.

The differences are mostly in the details. The Surface’s trackpad is smaller than the MacBook’s, which I don’t necessarily mind. The Surface is better equipped with ports than the MacBook Air, with a similar pair of do-everything USB-C ports and a headphone jack, a single USB-A port, and a microSD card slot. I have a mild preference for the notch-less Surface screen but the amount of usable screen space feels pretty similar overall.
The MacBook Air has the more impressive speakers though, at least when comparing the two 15-inch models—the Surface Laptop’s are OK, but the MacBook Air’s sound is clearer and bassier. I’d say the MacBook Air’s webcam is a bit better, too, especially in low light. Apple is removing more noise from the image in a way that can sometimes make skin look unnaturally smooth, but its picture quality is marginally brighter and cleaner-looking.
Both sizes of the Surface Laptop are just two or three-tenths of a pound heavier than equivalently sized MacBook Airs, and unlike the fanless MacBook Air, the Surface Laptops both use cooling fans. Though Microsoft wants the Surface Laptop compared most directly to the MacBook Air’s price and performance, the hardware itself is situated somewhere between the Airs and the lower-end MacBook Pros, something to keep in mind once we start talking about performance.
I never really noticed the Surface Laptop’s fans spinning up unless I was specifically hitting multiple CPU cores or playing a game for an extended period of time. Even when the fans would engage, the sound was more a low-intensity whoosh than a high-pitched whine. They stand in definite contrast to some Intel and AMD ultrabooks I’ve used, whose fans have shifted into jet-engine mode from the effort of installing Windows updates.

Surface Pro 11

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The Surface Pro 11 looks just like the last few Surface models.

Andrew Cunningham

The keyboard cover is a known quantity at this point, even this revised version that can detach from the tablet and still connect via Bluetooth.

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The Surface Slim Pen.

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Concerns about its utility as a tablet aside, the Surface Pro remains a well-built and elegant-looking piece of hardware, and I love the tint of the blue finish (Apple’s color finishes have been trending in a washed-out, pastel-hued direction I don’t love). And if you want to take the keyboard off so you can just use the tablet as a Netflix screen, it’s still nice to have the built-in kickstand—when I’m using an iPad and I want to lose the extra bulk of the keyboard, I need to swap to a different case if I still want to be able to prop the screen up somehow.
This is pretty much exactly the same Surface design that Microsoft has been using since the Surface Pro X and the Surface Pro 8 (which, yes, still means this thing doesn’t have a headphone jack). The keyboard covers and Surface Pens retain full compatibility with all of these tablets, so someone upgrading from a Surface Pro 8 could use their keyboard cover with the Surface Pro 11, and someone happy with a Surface Pro X could buy a new keyboard without having to double-check a long list of current and former models.
Microsoft’s keyboard pricing remains better than Apple’s, with the basic Surface Pro Keyboard cover starting at 0 instead of the 9 Apple wants for a Magic Keyboard. The only keyboard that matches Apple’s pricing is the 0 Surface Pro Flex Keyboard, which usually looks and acts like a normal keyboard cover but which can detach and use Bluetooth for occasions when it’s more convenient. I’m not sure this is worth the money, especially when external Bluetooth keyboards and mice cost just a fraction of 0, but at least the Flex Keyboard is one among many options and not the only first-party option.

Enlarge / The Surface Pro’s M.2 2232 SSD is easily accessible via a back panel that pops off.Andrew Cunningham

Nothing has changed about the Surface Slim Pen, which slots into many of Microsoft’s keyboard covers for storage and will run you the same 0 as an Apple Pencil Pro.
Unlike the Surface Laptop, the Surface Pro 11 can be configured with an OLED display, though much like Apple and the iPad Pro, Microsoft bundles a bunch of these spec upgrades together so you can’t buy one without paying for all of them. The cheapest OLED model is ,500 and requires upgrading from a Snapdragon X Plus to an X Elite and from 256GB of storage to 512GB.
The screen itself looks OK. OLED’s advantage is its functionally infinite contrast, which delivers deep blacks and none of the blooming effect you’ll see on regular LCD panels. But the OLED display panel Microsoft is using here is subtly grainy-looking, something I’ve experienced on plenty of other OLED-equipped PC laptops but which is not true of the new iPad Pro’s OLED screen. It’s most noticeable when you’re viewing flat colors (or blank white backgrounds) instead of text, icons, or images—like when you’re looking at the taskbar, Start menu, the Settings app, or an Explorer window. If this kind of thing bothers you, it’s difficult to avoid looking at it.

Another Windows-on-Arm check-in

A couple of times in the past two years, we’ve used Microsoft’s Windows Dev Kit 2023 (essentially the Arm version of the Surface Pro 9 inside of a plastic box) for some high-level check-ins on the state of Windows on Arm. And as of earlier this year, we found that many of the platform’s early compatibility issues had cleared up thanks to a combination of improved emulation and the long-awaited arrival of more native Windows-on-Arm apps that didn’t need to be translated.

Even compared to where Windows-on-Arm was a couple of years ago, or at the dawn of the Windows 11 era, things have improved a lot. The difference between using a Windows-on-Arm system and an Intel/AMD system, if you don’t play many games and you don’t have many niche hardware accessories or resource-intensive pro apps, is mostly invisible. Microsoft has, at long last, succeeded in making an Arm system that doesn’t give you an immediately, noticeably compromised version of the Windows experience. It’s almost too bad that the company’s arrival at this long-strived-for goal has been tied inextricably to a bunch of AI-powered features, among them the radioactively unpopular Recall screen recorder.
Despite the improvements to Prism, the new name for Microsoft’s x86-to-Arm app translation layer, and despite the increased speed of the Snapdragon X chips, I’m here to tell you that an emulated app still definitely feels like an emulated app. Right now, the Discord and Steam clients are easy and popular apps to try this with; both still exhibit small beats of hesitation and hitchy scrolling compared to native apps.
None of this is experience-ruining. And it was, it’s worth noting, exactly the same with Rosetta-emulated apps back in the early days of the Apple Silicon transition, indicating that this is not a problem with a foolproof solution.
But faster app translation should still be thought of as a stopgap solution at best; many apps run fine, a few were laggy enough to be genuinely unpleasant (the 3DMark user interface was surprisingly slow, and Adobe has apparently stopped letting people install the x86 version of Premiere on Arm systems). But in all cases, you can tell the difference between a translated app and a native one; using a translated app was always just annoying enough to send me searching to see whether the developer had said anything about the state of Arm support or had released a beta that would speed things up.

In short, the developers in charge of your favorite and/or mission-critical apps will still have a lot to do with how good it feels to use an Arm-based Windows PC.
The good news for Microsoft is that the native app situation is improving pretty rapidly these days, at least compared to two or three years ago, when you were lucky to find any third-party app that advertised native Arm compatibility. Just a couple of weeks ago—between now and the time I last wrote about Windows on Arm in late April—Slack began offering a native Arm version of its client, noticeably improving my day-to-day quality of life. Adobe has said that Arm-native versions of Premiere Pro and Illustrator are coming.

Games and drivers are still a sticking point

Qualcomm said that most games should “just work” on Snapdragon X Elite PCs, and though the graphics performance is well short of what you’d normally get on a “gaming PC,” I was pleasantly surprised about the number of things in my Steam library that just launched and ran normally.
Here are games I fired up that at least started and were playable, though some will definitely require some settings fine-tuning before they’ll run smoothly, if they run smoothly at all: American Truck Simulator, Deep Rock Galactic, Tabletop Simulator, Jackbox Party Pack 6 (which I would assume means any version of the Party Pack will also be fine), Dave the Diver, Ex-Zodiac (which did suffer initially from what felt like shader compilation stutter that I don’t normally experience on x86 PCs, but it gradually cleared up), Vampire Survivors, Stardew Valley, Palworld, Baldur’s Gate 3, BioShock (the original, not the remastered one), Hollow Knight, and Super Meat Boy.
This list is pretty heavily weighted in the direction of older and

Winsage