The Surface Laptop with Snapdragon

Still very much in line with the overall return to work mood of the past few weeks, I thought I’d post some notes about work gear. You see, I have been using a “Surface Laptop for Business 13in 1st Ed with Snapdragon” (I kid you not, that is what it is called) for a couple of months now.

And it might be the best Windows laptop I’ve ever used–at least in summer.

Disclaimer: This is a work machine–a loaner, alas, not a permanent replacement–but I’m writing it up under my review policy all the same.

Although I don’t have a MacBook Neo on hand, I’d like to get that comparison out of the way because the general look is quite similar–except for the taller display (which I quite like, by the way) and the Windows logo.

I looked up the Neo’s specifications and the Surface is a little narrower, slightly deeper front to back and a bit thicker, but they weigh practically the same. And yes, this looks and feels a lot like a MacBook in general–it has the metal case, large trackpad and even the rounded display corners down pat, which helps establish an overall feeling of polish.

Even though this is a 16GB machine, it is actually one of the entry-level Surface configurations as far as CPU (and size) are concerned–I am using the 13-inch 1st Edition, with the eight-core Snapdragon X Plus. You can check the online specs for the business model, but this is pretty much it:

• 8-core Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 (clocked at 3.30GHz)
• 16GB LPDDR5x RAM (15.6GB usable)
• 512GB SSD storage
• Qualcomm Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU, rated at 45 TOPS
• 13-inch PixelSense LCD, 1920x1280, 3:2 aspect ratio, 60Hz, 400 nits and 10-point touch
• Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
• 50Wh nominal battery
• 285.65 x 214.14 x 15.6mm, 1.22kg

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I like tall displays, and I am quite fond of the Surface’s, whose 3:2 aspect ratio accounts for that slightly taller feel I mentioned earlier.

The panel has a density of 178ppi (decent, but not Retina), a refresh rate of up to 60Hz and a rated brightness of 400 nits. The fact that it is a touchscreen is something I happily ignored for a long time with no ill effects, but it is quite useful, and colour reproduction seems quite good–I’ve found blacks to be nice and deep.

The keyboard is a bit hard to pin down–I quite like it, and it feels softer than a Mac’s, but with good travel and a slightly stronger “thock” when typing at speed.

It has a Copilot key (which I remapped to Search inside the first hour of using it), and the power button doubles as a Windows Hello-compatible fingerprint reader, so my hard-wired Touch ID reflex was quickly sated:

The backlight has three discrete levels, and if you’re used to a MacBook keyboard, you’ll need some adjustment regarding the Fn key (which is to the right of the left Ctrl).

As to the trackpad, it’s large, roomy and responsive, but the OS doesn’t drive it the way macOS does–there’s none of the gradual, weighted motion I’m used to, so gesture feedback feels noticeably different at first. But the responsiveness is there, just not for scrolling (and yes, one of the first things I did was to enable “natural” scrolling), and Windows swipe gestures work nicely.

One relevant note is that since I’m a “tap-to-click” person, it took me a while to realise that clicking only really “worked” halfway down the trackpad–typically for gestures like clicking with your thumb and dragging windows with a finger.

The Surface has one USB-A port and a headphone jack on the left and two USB-C on the right, with both USB-C ports specified for charging, data and DisplayPort 1.4a, with support for up to two 4K displays at 60Hz.

They read out as USB 3.2 ports rather than USB4 or Thunderbolt. On occasion, only the port farthest from the screen would drive an external display, and the documentation doesn’t explain the difference I saw between them.

That didn’t stop it from being very enjoyable to use for work–I was able to drive a 4500x3000 panel at 60Hz (and a Logitech Brio 4K hanging off its USB hub) with zero issues, and the experience was excellent throughout.

The “Omnisonic” (again, that’s actually what they are called) speakers are invisible–no grille or opening that I can find, and yet they sound surprisingly good, which justifies the Dolby Audio label. The two “Studio” mics discreetly embedded in the bezel alongside the 1080p front-facing camera also worked fine, and over the past couple of months I had zero complaints during Teams calls.

Two of the reasons why I love this machine are that it is dead quiet (I’ve never heard a fan) and, most importantly, it stayed almost perfectly cool in normal use throughout late July and August.

I did start out by feeling some warmth under load in the first few hours (yes, Windows Update, thank you), but over longer use it has been confined to the underside. The bottom case never seemed to go past about 42°C under sustained load, and the heat spread pretty uniformly–at least based on my spot IR thermometer.

One of the stranger bits of friction has been Wi-Fi roaming. The machine uses a Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 adapter, and with my Wi-Fi 6 setup it kept dropping off the network often enough that I did an AP-side audit rather than blame Windows on vibes alone.

The living room AP looked healthy, with continuous telemetry, no LAN or backhaul errors and good 5GHz associations. But the Surface was the most frequently disconnecting client in the OpenWrt hostapd logs, repeatedly dropping off and reassociating across the access points.

That made client-side roaming or band steering worth investigating, especially with usteer in the mix, but the logs alone were inconclusive, and without Linux support doing any low-level troubleshooting on the Surface was out of the question.

I lowered the driver’s Roaming aggressiveness setting to Medium-low, and that seems to have fixed it. Preferring 5GHz and disabling adapter power saving would have been my next steps, but it wasn’t necessary. I am considering delving into WLAN AutoConfig logs further to help distinguish Windows/driver decisions from AP-side steering, but if it works, I’m not going to “fix” it further.

Spoiler: I had zero issues. I did not think twice about this being an ARM device, nor did I do any weird compatibility tests–in fact, up until I started drafting this I hadn’t even installed WSL (it works perfectly for what I tried, and you get an ARM Linux userland, just as you would expect).

This is because I have been using it almost exclusively for non-developer work (Office, Teams calls, a lot of Remote Desktop–which is where I actually develop), and the occasional CAD session using Shapr3D, which supports Windows on ARM and ran flawlessly.

I also tested exactly zero games running natively on it (and would not use a laptop for gaming, anyway, unless I was streaming to it). Rather than bore you with random performance figures, I will just say that I never felt it slow down in any relevant way.

And that is considering the massive use I make of an eclectic mix of Office web and native apps with dozens of simultaneously open documents in either flavour–I don’t keep around hundreds of background Edge tabs, but I do have pinned tabs with key documents for each project and use them, which is arguably more demanding.

Since most of my work is actually server-side AI, I barely noticed (or used) any of the AI features that ship with the machine; one I did use was simply swiping in from the edge of the screen and lassoing text to summarise, which was quick and easy enough to draft Teams messages from project documents. I didn’t dig into the mechanics, but it seems to be using a local model to do the summarisation (and OCR).

This class of Snapdragon NPU isn’t particularly useful for LLM work, but the camera effects got more use. Windows Studio Effects does automatic framing (which I found very useful), eye contact correction and portrait lighting (which I honestly didn’t find useful), with no noticeable performance overhead. Again, as a Teams machine, this is pretty much perfect.

The blurbs I’ve seen about the 50Wh battery say it’s nominally rated for up to 23 hours of local video playback or 16 hours of active web use, which feels about right.

Those tests typically use fixed workloads, so neither figure is really representative of how long it lasts with Teams running, but I can tell you that on a quiet week, I was able to use it for around three days with continuous stints of around 4 hours (I need to keep moving around on account of my back and posture, so I roam about the house a bit).

There were a couple of low points (typically associated with meeting-dense days), but I was assured a full day’s worth of battery life on occasional office trips. I didn’t measure charge times, but a 65W charger had it ready to use again over lunch (a Portuguese lunch, mind you).

I love this thing’s size (it is smaller and lighter than my MacBook Pro), simplicity and utter lack of fussiness in design language (even the feet are… cutely minimal), and the only thing I’d change about it would be making it easier to open (there’s no bevel under the trackpad, just a very slightly protruding, sharpish front edge).

Windows on ARM might still be a drawback for some people, though. We actually skipped buying one of these a couple of weeks ago (and went for a Lenovo with a brand new low-power Intel Arrow Lake/Ultra 7 chip) because one of my kids needs to run SolidWorks for college. But it was a close call, and there were other factors (like an OLED screen and being able to run Linux, not to mention being able to swap storage later).

But if, like me, most of your work revolves around Office and happens on remote machines, this is a very sweet laptop, and I am actually trying to replace my main work machine with one of these…