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

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Microsoft has been trying to make Windows-on-Arm-processors a thing for so long that, at some point, I think I just started assuming it was never actually going to happen.

The first effort was Windows RT, which managed to run well enough on the piddly Arm hardware available at the time but came with a perplexing new interface and couldn't run any apps designed for regular Intel- and AMD-based Windows PCs. Windows RT failed, partly because a version of Windows that couldn't run Windows apps and didn't use a familiar Windows interface was ignoring two big reasons why people keep using Windows.

Windows-on-Arm came back in the late 2010s, with better performance and a translation layer for 32-bit Intel apps in tow. This version of Windows, confined mostly to oddball Surface hardware and a handful of barely promoted models from the big PC OEMs, has quietly percolated for years. It has improved slowly and gradually, as have the Qualcomm processors that have powered these devices.

That brings us to this year's flagship Microsoft Surface hardware: the 7th-edition Surface Laptop and the 11th-edition Surface Pro.

These devices are Microsoft's first mainstream, flagship Surface devices to use Arm chips, whereas previous efforts have been side projects or non-default variants. Both hardware and software have improved enough that I finally feel I could recommend a Windows-on-Arm device to a lot of people without having to preface it with a bunch of exceptions.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has chosen to launch this impressive and capable Arm hardware and improved software alongside a bunch of generative AI features, including the Recall screen recorder, a feature that became so radioactively unpopular so quickly that Microsoft was forced to delay it to address major security problems (and perception problems stemming from the security problems).

The remaining AI features are so superfluous that I'll ignore them in this review and cover them later on when we look closer at Windows 11's 24H2 update. This is hardware that is good enough that it doesn't need buzzy AI features to sell it. Windows on Arm continues to present difficulties, but the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop—and many of the other Arm-based Copilot+ PCs that have launched in the last couple of weeks—are a whole lot better than Arm PCs were even a year or two ago.

Familiar on the outside

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

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

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 $140 instead of the $349 Apple wants for a Magic Keyboard. The only keyboard that matches Apple's pricing is the $350 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 $350, but at least the Flex Keyboard is one among many options and not the only first-party option.

The Surface Pro's M.2 2232 SSD is easily accessible via a back panel that pops off. Credit: 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 $130 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 $1,500 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 simpler games, but that's also the class of game I would expect to run on a regular Intel or AMD PC with integrated graphics in the first place. People don't expect these machines to play brand-new AAA games at max settings, but if a new Stardew update comes out, these Arm PCs won't stop you from loading up another farm and losing a few more days of your life (I say this affectionately and not judgmentally).

Others have had more mixed experiences; the Shadow of the Tomb Raider game and its accompanying benchmark apparently won't run on these systems. And games with kernel-level anti-cheat software generally won't launch and run at all, at least not until Arm-native versions of that software are enabled (it's a type of x86 software that Windows doesn't attempt to translate). Newer games that use AVX instructions may not run. And while I got pretty lucky with my random-ish list of games, there will certainly be other one-off titles that won't work for any number of reasons.

After our testing finished, Qualcomm announced that it would release a GPU driver beta with fixes and performance improvements for a dozenish games (none of the ones we tried, but there were some big ones, including Cyberpunk 2077). Hopefully some combination of developer effort, OS improvements from Microsoft, and driver improvements from Qualcomm will continue to improve performance and compatibility (a lot like it works on any PC).

The other big hitch right now is third-party hardware, specifically hardware that requires drivers that aren't included in Windows. Keyboards, mice, Bluetooth accessories, and printers that use generic drivers will all be fine; anything that puts a question mark in Device Manager will be harder to deal with.

Video capture cards, audio preamps, colorimeter hardware, external GPUs, or even printers or scanners that require some kind of driver for advanced functionality—there aren't Arm Windows drivers for most of these things, and there's no way for Microsoft to translate or emulate the problem away.

The company has released tools that will let hardware developers create Arm-compatible hardware drivers, and hopefully we'll see multi-architecture support in drivers become more common, just like it has for regular applications. But beyond app compatibility, this is the biggest blocker for using either Surface device or any Windows on Arm hardware for more specialized tasks.

Performance: Snapdragon X Elite, tested

Qualcomm has been hyping the Snapdragon X Elite relentlessly for months. And while the company's past Windows chips have underwhelmed—excluding, perhaps, last year's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3/Microsoft SQ3, which was fine—there was good reason to be excited about the X Elite. It was being developed by some of the same core personnel who put together Apple's A- and M-series chips, which collectively proved that high-performance Arm processors were more than just theoretical.

But Qualcomm was also careful to limit independent testing of its chips early on, presenting impressive-looking numbers achieved using reference systems. Some reporting claimed that Qualcomm was "cheating" on these performance tests, though, and that Qualcomm and Microsoft's OEM partners were seeing performance less than half as fast as what Qualcomm was advertising.

That reporting never really made sense—if Qualcomm was lying that much about something so easily disprovable, independent testing would uncover it almost immediately, creating a completely self-inflicted PR nightmare for both Microsoft and Qualcomm (which isn't to say that either company is above creating self-inflicted PR nightmares). But those rumors, the slow drip of tightly controlled information from Qualcomm, and the number of times that Microsoft has tried and mostly failed to make Windows-on-Arm happen were all reasons to wait and see before jumping to conclusions about the chips' performance.

Some caveats before we get to the numbers: Microsoft sent us Surfaces equipped with top-of-the-range Snapdragon X Elite chips, and it's safe to say that slower X Elite variants and the cut-down X Plus models will be less impressive. We're comfortable saying that each should be more than capable of handling everyday computing tasks, but performance comparisons with Apple, Intel, and AMD will all look less impressive with slower chips. Bear this in mind as you compare systems.

The good news for Qualcomm and anyone who buys one of these PCs is that the Snapdragon X Elite's performance generally ranges from "good" to "very good," depending on the kind of workload you're talking about and the settings you're using. Especially for the Surface Pro 11, which is smaller and more thermally constrained, the delta between CPU performance using the default "recommended" power setting and the "best performance" power setting is pretty wide.

But even when its performance is capped to reduce temperatures and power use, its CPU performance usually lands somewhere between Apple's M2 and its M4 and is easily capable of keeping pace with or beating recent processors from Intel and AMD. The X Elite is also well over twice as fast as the last-generation Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, also known as the Microsoft SQ3. It's a huge leap forward for Qualcomm, any way you look at it.

If there's less good news for Qualcomm in all of this, it's that its integrated GPU performance doesn't come off, and neither does its CPU performance. The Adreno GPU lands somewhere between an Apple M1 and M2, though closer to an M2—and the Best Performance power setting only marginally improves its speed. Once again, The X Elite is about twice as fast as the last-generation 8cx Gen 3. But even if you set aside the overhead from x86-to-Arm translation and compatibility issues, this is still very much an integrated GPU, and higher settings and resolutions won't be possible.

The other issue for Qualcomm is that even with this chip, the company is still in catch-up mode with Apple. The M4 is currently only available in high-end iPads, but once the chip and its offshoots come to the Mac, they'll beat Qualcomm's performance across the board. Qualcomm (and by extension, the Windows-on-Arm ecosystem) is still playing a bit of catch-up, assuming that Qualcomm needs the typical 12-to-18 months to field a successor to the X Elite. Qualcomm's chips also need fans (or, at least, they come with fans in every Copilot+ PC that's currently being shipped), whereas Apple's acquit themselves fairly well even in fanless systems like the MacBook Air.

It's difficult to estimate the Snapdragon's power efficiency because there aren't as many software tools for measuring power management as there are for the other chips we test—at least, not yet. HWInfo can display some basic information but nothing about CPU power usage, and there's no Windows equivalent to macOS' built-in powermetrics tool. As third-party software is updated, we'll be able to revisit the power efficiency question, though for now, we can at least say that performance is competitive.

As for battery life, our typical PCMark test doesn't run, so I'm left to rely on anecdotes. When using mostly Arm-native apps, battery life on the 15-inch Surface Laptop felt a lot like it does on an M1 or M3 MacBook Air—I could get through an active workday, use my computer on and off in the evening, and start another workday before having to plug in mid-morning.

That's hardly scientific, and your mileage could vary greatly, particularly if you rely heavily on translated apps. But the Arm Surfaces do feel more like the Apple Silicon MacBooks than any Windows PC I've used recently (my main touch points being recent Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbons and the last few iterations of Framework Laptop 13).

Conclusions

The Copilot button on a Surface Pro keyboard cover. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

When Apple kicked off its Intel-to-Arm transition with the M1, we declared it a success based both on its performance and how smoothly the transition felt, even in its early days. "The majority of Mac users may never even have an inkling that a change of architecture has occurred," we wrote.

These new Surfaces and the other Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ PCs don't quite do the same thing, especially on compatibility, but this is to be expected given the larger sprawl of the Windows ecosystem and the wider variety of apps (particularly games) that Windows is tasked with running. By the time the M1 came out, Apple had been deprecating old kernel extensions and winding down 32-bit app support for years, ensuring that by the time the silicon switch did happen, much of the software that would have been broken had already been broken by software decisions.

So I think the Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7 are as close as the Windows ecosystem will get to an Apple Silicon moment. Performance and battery life are both good, and native Arm app support is good enough that it's possible to use a Windows laptop using mostly Arm-optimized apps for all kinds of common tasks without noticing problems. If all you do is browse the web, watch videos, listen to music, play casual games, edit Office documents, and sync files between systems, you have basically nothing to worry about here.

Evaluated solely as PCs, and setting aside the Copilot+ stuff entirely, these are surprisingly good systems, something I would have had trouble saying about a Windows on Arm PC even a couple of years ago. There are many reasons to stick with reliable old Intel or AMD—and Microsoft even admits as much by giving big businesses a way to continue to buy modern Intel-based Surface systems. Intel and/or AMD could also come back with much better chips that negate the benefits of the Arm systems while rendering all the compatibility questions moot (Pentium M, Athlon 64, Core 2, and the whole Ryzen series are good examples of what these companies can produce under pressure).

But Apple's Arm transition has shown that there can be big upsides to moving away from Intel and AMD, and it's hard to imagine Apple going back. If the Windows ecosystem is ever going to undergo a similar shift, this hardware and these chips are the first products that actually seem good enough to get things started.

The good

Solidly built hardware with very good performance
Nice keyboards, trackpads, and screens
Windows on Arm compatibility and emulation speed has improved a lot over the last two years
Many linchpin Windows apps, including Google Chrome, are already Arm-native; more are coming later
Surprisingly decent game compatibility if your game isn't using anti-cheat software
Fan noise is unobtrusive and relatively rare
Solid battery life

The bad

AI features are superfluous
Some Surface Pro keyboard accessories are expensive
Some upgrades (like the OLED screen for the Surface Pro) can only be bought if you pay for other unrelated processor and storage upgrades
Grainy Surface Pro OLED screen

The ugly

Some enduring compatibility problems that can only be solved by Arm-native versions of apps written for regular Intel and AMD PCs

Listing image: Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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