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At $899, the new Surface Laptop 13-inch is a tough sell. You really have to want it for exactly what it is, and be willing to pay for it. After all, the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop has a much better processor, a higher-resolution screen, USB4, and facial recognition for $100 more. In a briefing, Microsoft compared it to an M3 MacBook Air, an odd choice because it also offers a lot more, and likely costs less given that M3 is last-gen.
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I've always been a fan of the Surface Laptop Go, and that's what this product should have been. It should cost $600, and it would be an excellent mid-tier device. It's a fine productivity machine with great battery life, an excellent keyboard, and a passable display.
But should you buy it for $899? Almost certainly not.
Microsoft provided XDA with a Surface Laptop 13-inch for review. It had no input on the contents of this article.
Surface Laptop 13-inch
Pros & Cons
- Thin and light
- Excellent keyboard
- Copilot+ and other NPU-focused features are starting to shine
- Poor value for your money
- Snapdragon X Plus 8-core is underpowered
- Low-res display
Surface Laptop 13-inch pricing and availability
The Surface Laptop 13-inch is available on May 20 starting at $899.99. That will get you a Snapdragon X Plus 8-core, 16GB RAM, and 256GB of storage. That model only comes in Platinum, although for $999, you get 512GB storage and options of Platinum, Ocean, and Violet.
Note that the Surface Laptop 13.8-inch starts at $999 with a significantly better Snapdragon X Plus 10-core, 16GB RAM, and 256GB storage. That particular model was removed from Microsoft.com when the 13-inch model launched, but I was assured by Microsoft that it will continue to be available on Best Buy and other retailers.
Other differences with the 13.8-inch model include a 201ppi 120Hz display instead of 178ppi 60Hz, facial recognition instead of fingerprint recognition, and perhaps most importantly, USB4 instead of USB 3.2.
Surface Laptop 13-inch specs
CPU Snapdragon X Plus 8-Core X1P-42-100
GPU Qualcomm Adreno™ GPU
Display type Touchscreen: 13” PixelSense™ display Contrast ratio: 1000:1 Refresh rate: up to 60Hz Color profile: sRGB and Enhanced Individually color-calibrated display Adaptive color Adaptive contrast Touch: 10-point multi-touch Strengthened glass display Brightness: 400 nits maximum (typical)
Display (Size, Resolution) Touchscreen: 13” PixelSense™ display, 1920x1280 (178ppi)
RAM 16GB LPDDR5x RAM
Storage Removable 256GB, 512GB (UFS)
Battery Up to 16 hours of active web usage
Ports 2 X USB-C ®/ USB 3.2 ports, USB-A 3.1, 3.5mm audio
Operating System Windows 11 Home
Webcam 1080p Full HD camera
Wi-Fi connectivity Wi-Fi 7
Bluetooth Bluetooth Core 5.4
Dimensions 11.25x8.43x0.61 inches
Weight 2.7 pounds
Speakers Omnisonic® speakers with Dolby Audio
Colors Platinum, Ocean, Violet
Price Starts at $899
NPU Qualcomm® Hexagon™ with 45 TOPS
It's a beautiful, thin and light design
It's a Surface, through and through
Just like we've seen with every Surface through the years, Microsoft took great care with the design. This is a beautiful product. The company sent me the Ocean variant, although Violet looks amazing from the photos I've seen, and Platinum is the classic color.
The Ocean color is nicer than I thought it would be from the photos I had seen. While it had appeared to be more of a gunmetal gray, there's more of a green tint to it. It's pretty aptly named.
It's made of aluminum and comes in at 2.7 pounds, with Microsoft boasting it being the thinnest and lightest Surface Laptop its ever made, something that's only true if you don't include the Surface Laptop Go lineup. That makes it the same weight as a MacBook Air, and a tiny bit heavier than a Dell XPS 13.
The screen has rounded corners, which we all know is the most important thing. Much like RGB lighting on a gaming PC, it makes it faster.
The display is a compromise though. There's a lower pixel density than you get on a Surface Laptop 13.8-inch, and it's noticeable, not even counting the 60Hz refresh rate. Colors and brightness are fine, but the resolution impact is real.
The keyboard is great, like I'd expect from a Surface. It's perfectly comfortable to type on, with the resistance that I expect from something premium. In fact, at first glance, you'll feel like this laptop is a lot better than it actually is.
Ports are disappointing. There's a USB Type-A port on the left and two USB Type-C ports on the right, but the USB-C ports are USB 3.2 instead of USB4. If you use a Thunderbolt dock to connect to dual 4K displays like I do, you can't anymore. Each monitor needs its own port now.
That may sound like it's not a big deal, but it is. This product is branded as a Surface Laptop, not something lesser, but it is something lesser. If I go and recommend a Surface Laptop to a friend, they can no longer expect the same experience from whichever one they choose.
It's a beautiful device. If there's one thing you can always expect from Surface, it's build quality.
A Surface Laptop Go by any other name
I truly do not understand the branding
I always liked the Surface Laptop Go series. It was a more compact laptop, but unlike the Surface Go series, it actually had a proper Core i5 so it got the job done. Over three generations, the prices increased, and with Laptop Go 3, it actually started at $800, and it's now $949 with recent price increases.
The Surface Laptop 13-inch should have been marketed as the Surface Laptop Go 4, despite the modestly larger screen. It goes without saying at this point, but the Surface Pro 12-inch should have been called the Surface Go 5.
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Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 review: A fancy meal reheated (again) for 2023
The Surface Laptop Go is back for a third generation, and it's still the 12-inch laptop to beat despite a lack of innovation.
Surface Laptop Go always had a lower pixel density than the Surface Laptop proper, and it had a fingerprint sensor for biometric authentication instead of facial recognition. Sound familiar? It was even marketed as thinner and lighter, just like this product.
Has this been called Surface Laptop Go 4, it would be a lot easier to understand that this is a mid-tier product. The price is still high, but at least it's not in the same classification as the flagship.
Copilot+ is starting to come together
It's still not worth spending actual money on though
I am well aware that most of the people reading this article do not care about AI, or at least the branding part of it. What people do care about is new things that they can do with their PCs, and there's a lot of that here.
Copilot+ was announced on May 20 last year, almost a year ago. The launch features ended up being really limited, and we're not seeing general availability of hero features like Recall until now. And that assumes that you care about Recall to begin with.
Recall is cool; it takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds and indexes them so you can search them. If you're trying to get back to something you were looking at and you don't remember the name of it, it's a useful tool. But there's so much more to Copilot+ now.
I really like the new Windows Search, which now has all of your stuff indexed so you can use descriptions of what you're searching for. For example, I searched for a photo of a red shirt, and it pulled up a photo from 2016. Moreover, I searched for a photo of the best phone ever, and it showed me a picture I took a while back that was focused on the Nokia 3310.
Not a bad choice, but I did wonder why it chose the 3310, and it turned out it wasn't random. I asked Copilot what the best phone ever was, and sure enough, it mentioned the Nokia 3310, so Windows Search is using Copilot to be informed about these things. It's super interesting.
It's not perfect. I asked for a picture of a Windows Phone and it gave me the Razr Ultra, probably because that's the most recent photo of a phone that I've uploaded. Other results in that search were accurate though.
Another neat feature is Click to Do. You hold the Win button and click on something, and an overlay appears that lets you select objects from your screen that you can action. You can search the web, use the selected item to ask Copilot, and more. Microsoft is continuing to build out more features for this.
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The Snapdragon X Plus 8-core has the same 45 TOPS NPU as the rest of Qualcomm's PC chipset family, and since it's been almost a year, it's cool to see this really starting to come together. In June when these devices shipped, I said it's worth buying these products because they're great laptops, but not for Copilot+. Now, I'm starting to see that I really don't want to use a laptop that doesn't have these features.
A Snapdragon X Plus 8-core laptop has no business costing this much
It's decidedly mid-range
The Snapdragon X Plus 8-core is fine for general productivity tasks. While Microsoft is focusing on multi-core CPU performance, it's important to remember that the integrated Adreno graphics are severely downgraded when compared to the Snapdragon X Plus 10-core and the Snapdragon X Elite. I don't even like running Photoshop on this thing.
In fact, it even choked up a bit when handling larger Google Sheets. But with 16GB RAM and its eight cores, it handles my dozens of Chrome tabs like a champ.
But in general, this is just a mid-tier chip. And I don't mean that in the sense that I'd compare it to a Core Ultra 5. I'd think about this more in terms of a Core Ultra 3.
There's not much else to talk about here. If you want performance, this isn't it. If you want an adequate exclusively-productivity-focused experience, it can do that.
|
2,426 / 11,173 |
2,803 / 14,497 |
2,937 / 11,879 |
|
109 / 694 |
124 / 972 |
141 / 630 |
|
1,064 / 11,548 / 16,629 |
1,892 / 16,878 / 25,257 |
|
|
1,289 |
1,558 |
1,773 |
I put the scores next to the Surface Laptop proper and the M3 MacBook Air because they sit at similar price points. As I've pointed out several times, you get quite a lot more by spending the extra $100 on a base model 13.8-inch Surface Laptop, and in fact, that product is often discounted to $799. An M4 MacBook Air starts at $999, so let's assume a $100 discount on an M3 model, which is still available at various retailers not named Apple. Also, Microsoft directly compared the product to the M3 itself.
M3, unsurprisingly, wins across the board in single-core scores. It narrowly loses in one multi-core test, but what's missing is head-to-head graphics tests. I can tell you that the M3 will smoke the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core GPU, which grossly underperforms compared to the X Plus 10-core and X Elite.
The Snapdragon X Plus 8-core is a fine processor for general productivity tasks from a $600 laptop. But for $900, don't bother with it, especially given the screen quality and lack of USB4.
One thing that is great is battery life. We're talking a minimum of 7 hours 59 minutes (I could have said eight hours, but that wouldn't be exact), and on average, you're looking at a good 10 hours. As usual, testing was done by simply using the device for work, meaning Chrome, Slack, OneNote, and other such productivity applications. Like I alluded to, I really didn't spend a lot of time in Photoshop on this one. The power slider was set to Balanced, since again, it wasn't worth attempting anything that would require 'Best Performance' resources.
Should you buy the Surface Laptop 13-inch?
You should buy the Surface Laptop 13-inch if:
- You shouldn't. I've got nothing here.
You should NOT buy the Surface Laptop 13-inch if:
- You're a person with money spending it on a new laptop
There are a lot of laptops on the market, a lot of good laptops. Most likely, it's an investment, something you'll use to earn a living in one form or another. The Surface Laptop 13-inch is not a good investment, and in fact, Microsoft has a much better product in the 13.8-inch model.
Seriously, take a look at the products you can buy for $899. It's not going to take long before you realize that there's no reason at all to pick this one.
Normally, we end reviews with a product box for the device we're reviewing, but I'm going to break from that tradition and leave you with the Surface Laptop 13.8-inch, which is currently $100 cheaper than the 13-inch model at Best Buy, and way better.
Surface Laptop 7
$799 $999 Save $200
The Surface Laptop 7 is the first major shakeup the lineup has received since its inception, with a brand-new design with thinner bezels, plus a new haptic touchpad. The laptop now comes in 13.8- or 15-inch models, and it's powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X plus chips.
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