The Snapdragon X Elite is finally here, and with it Windows laptops that can take on the MacBook when they’re far behind. After a day with Microsoft’s latest Surface Laptop, I’m excited for this new one. will come.
I’ve been a Windows user all my life. For the most part, macOS has never held my interest. And every time I used it, I didn’t like it more. It really was death by a thousand cuts. But there was one thing I couldn’t ignore. Apple has completely nailed it with the most important parts of a laptop, namely battery life. Apple’s switch to Silicon made MacBooks more attractive than ever, so I finally gave up on Windows and just bought a MacBook Air out of frustration.
But then came the Snapdragon X Elite.
Qualcomm announced a new Windows chipset last year big makes promises. It was against the promises of Windows on Arm for years and fell incredibly short. Poor software support, lackluster performance, and crude emulation made for experiences that simply weren’t worth anyone’s time. But the Snapdragon X Elite looked promising from day one and continued to impress until the hardware was finally announced.
So after a few months of experience, I was excited to try the Microsoft Surface Laptop and ditch the MacBook Air. And after just one day, I’m already pretty happy.
Starting with the physical hardware, the latest Surface Laptop is a perfect machine. The aluminum body is quite thin and looks great in the ‘Platinum’ finish I bought – blue is the best choice, but I’m going to put a skin on it anyway. The keyboard, touchpad and screen are all excellent. The keys have plenty of travel, Microsoft’s first touch sensor is easily as good as the MacBook Air I’ve used before, and the screen is bright. The 13.8-inch size also feels perfect for travel, which was my main focus, and I’m always tired of having too many ports.
But obviously there are two main things we all want to know. Battery life and performance.
Considering I’ve only had this machine for a little over a day, I can draw a lot of conclusions about both of these. But after a full day of work, I was impressed with both accounts. From 9:30 AM to 6:30 PM, using the laptop almost the entire time, the battery dropped from 100% to 24%. Not just watching videos, but considering I work with dozens of Chrome tabs, WordPress, and Photoshop all day, that’s great.
And on that note, the performance was very good throughout.
I didn’t experience a single slowdown in anything I did throughout the day. Photoshop held up like a champ, which wasn’t a huge surprise since it’s a native Arm program. Almost all of the apps I work with are native, including Chrome and Slack. The only ones I’ve come across that aren’t native yet are Beeper, Lightroom Classic, and Steam. Steam and Beeper were also running in the background most of the day. Performance on emulated apps isn’t as good as native apps, as expected, but that’s not a deal breaker. Lightroom Classic was my big fear here, but it worked flawlessly. I was able to edit photos and export them with ease and never knew I was using an emulated app.
I’m very happy with the Surface Laptop so far. It’s the car I’ve been waiting for years. I’ll be using it more in the coming weeks and doing a full review, but in the meantime, what else do you want to know? Comment below with something you’d like me to test or a question you have and I’ll see what I can do.
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