The new Surface Laptop beats the MacBook Air in every way but one

The Surface Laptop was always meant to be a proper MacBook Air competitor. It had the sleek design and branding to pull it off, but was always lacking in performance and battery life to compete.

With the move to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips and Copilot+, though, there was a renewed hope that the Surface Laptop 7th Edition could not only compete with the MacBook Air M3 — but actually defeat it. To my own surprise, after spending some time with the device, I’m convinced it may be the best Surface device ever made.

Specs and configurations

Both laptops have 13-inch and 15-inch class versions. The Surface Laptop 13.8-inch model starts at $999 for a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chipset, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. The M3 MacBook Air has a starting price of $1,099, though it comes with just 8GB of RAM. An equivalent MacBook Air configured with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage comes in at $1,299. It should be mentioned, though, that adding the extra memory includes an upgrade with two additional GPU cores.

Both companies charge an extra $200 to double the storage to 512GB or $400 to get to 1TB. That means in general, the Surface Laptop is $200 cheaper than the MacBook Air. The one caveat is that Microsoft charges $200 to go from the Snapdragon X Plus to the Snapdragon X Elite — still coming in $100 cheaper than the MacBook Air.

Design

These laptops have a lot in common. They’re both thin and light devices, coming in two different sizes that line up pretty well in terms of dimensions. Both are attractive laptops, and both are among the best-built laptops available today.

This time around, the Surface Laptop has thinner bezels, though not as quite as slim as the MacBook Air. Then again, it doesn’t have that notch either. Both laptops also have screens with rounded corners, though with the MacBook Air, it’s just the top corners.

While the Surface Laptop 13.8-inch model is reasonably thin and light at 0.69 inches and 2.96 pounds, the MacBook Air 13 is insanely thin at 0.44 inches and it’s slightly lighter at 2.7 pounds. Then the MacBook Air 15 is just 0.45 inches thick and weighs 3.3 pounds, compared to the Surface Laptop that’s 0.72 inches thick and weight 3.67 pounds. The MacBook Air is considerably thinner, and there’s no getting around that.

The other major difference between these two laptops is in color options. Both devices offer four color options — the MacBook Air with Silver, Starlight, Space Gray, and Midnight — and the Surface Laptop 7th Edition with Sapphire, Platinum, Black, and Dune. Microsoft’s options are more bold, while the MacBook Air’s are a bit more subtle.

Keyboards and touchpads

The MacBook Air 13 has Apple’s Magic Keyboard, with remains one of the best keyboards around. It has large keycaps with plenty of key spacing, and the switches are light and snappy. The Surface Laptop 7th Edition’s keyboard has been updated, and it’s a pure joy to type on. I like the larger keycaps of the MacBook Air, including in the function row.

Both laptops now have haptic touchpads. The MacBook Air 13’s Force Touch touchpad is as good as always, with extreme precision and responsiveness and the Force Click feature that adds another dimension (no pun intended) to accessing additional functionality. The Surface Laptop has a new haptic touchpad in a wider format. The 13.8-inch model’s looks nice and large, though the 15-inch model uses the same size of touchpad, leaving lots of idle space around the palm rests. The 15-inch MacBook Air has a larger touchpad that better fills out the space.

The Surface Laptop’s display is touch- and pen-enabled, however, something that the MacBook Air 13’s display can’t boast.

Connectivity, webcams, and security

The Surface Laptop has two USB-C/USB4 ports, a USB-A 3.1 port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and the Surface Connect port for charging. The 15-inch model throws in a microSD card slot for good measure.

The MacBook Air M3 has two USB-C/USB4 ports with Thunderbolt 3 support, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a MagSafe 3 connection for charging. That makes the MacBook Air a slightly more modern device but without the legacy support. Note that the Surface Laptop can connect to three 4K external displays, while the MacBook Air M3 can connect to just one with the internal display active and two with the lid closed.

Wireless connectivity is more advanced on the Surface Laptop, with support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. The MacBook Air M3 is limited to Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

The Surface Laptop definitely takes the overall win in terms of connectivity.

Each laptop has a 1080p webcam, and the Surface Laptop has neural processing unit (NPU) support for various AI features such as Microsoft’s Studio Effects for background blurring, automatic framing, creative filters, and more. Both laptops have access to AI capabilities that can be processed locally, though the Surface Laptop has a more powerful NPU — at least until the MacBook Air gets updated to the M4.

The Surface Laptop has an infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition, while the MacBook Air M3 has only a Touch ID fingerprint reader.

Performance

The most important upgrade to the new Surface Laptop is the transition from Intel to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipsets. The new chipsets offer performance that rivals the MacBook Air’s Apple Silicon M3 chipsets, which like Qualcomm’s are based on the Arm architecture. The Snapdragon X has two variants: the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus and the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite. The M3 chipset has eight CPU cores. According to leaked benchmarks, the Snapdragon X Elite is faster in Geekbench 6 while the Snapdragon X Plus might be around the same speed.

The first testing certainly seems promising, but we’ll have to wait for formal benchmark testing of Qualcomm’s chipset to say which is faster. It’s likely that both laptops will be very fast for productivity users, with performance in creative applications an open question. The Snapdragon X chipset uses the Qualcomm Adreno GPU, which might be slightly slower than the M3’s eight-core or 10-core GPU, but again, that remains to be seen. We’ll note that the Surface Laptop has fans, while the MacBook Air is fanless. That makes the MacBook run quieter, but it might cap sustained performance more than we’ll see with the Surface Laptop.

Both laptops have neural processing units (NPUs), which Apple calls the Neural Engine. Qualcomm claims 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS), while Apple says the M3 achieves 18 TOPS. If these numbers are comparable, the Surface Laptop will have faster on-device AI performance until Apple releases a MacBook Air with the M4 chipset, which Apple claims hits 38 TOPS.

Display and audio

The Surface Laptop has two display sizes — 13.8 inches and 15 inches — both in the 3:2 aspect ratio. The 13.8-inch display runs at 2304 by 1536 and the 15-inch at 2496 by 1664, which is just slightly less sharp than the MacBook Air’s 13.6-inch 2560 by 1664 and 15.3-inch 2880 by 1864. All displays are IPS, and the Surface Laptop displays have the advantage of running at 120Hz compared to the MacBook Air’s displays that are limited to 60Hz.

The Surface Laptop and MacBook Air have very similar quality — nearly identical color accuracy, contrast, and color saturation. The one area where the Surface Laptop has an upper edge, however, is its brightness. It maxes out at 561 nits, while the MacBook Air gets up to 497 nits. So, the MacBook Air is sharper, but the Surface Laptop is faster and brighter.

In terms of audio, however, the MacBook Air has a complete advantage. The MacBook Air M3 13-inch has an excellent four-speaker audio system that’s better than most competitors, while the 15-inch version has the same six-speaker audio with force-canceling woofers that match the more expensive MacBook Pros. That’s the best audio available on laptops today. The Surface Laptop has a pair of Omnisonic speakers that project through the keyboard. The system provides decent audio, but it’s not on the level of the MacBook Air.

Portability

Both laptops are highly portable, in both their 13-inch and 15-inch versions. However, the MacBook Air M3 is the most portable laptop of all, being thinner than any other laptop currently available and considerably lighter than the Surface Laptop.

Microsoft is claiming that the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop will achieve up to 20 hours of local video playback and up to 13 hours of active web usage, and the 15-inch version up to 22 hours and 15 hours, respectively. In our testing, the MacBook Air M3 13-inch achieved 19.5 hours of web browsing, which would make it significantly longer-lasting than the Surface Laptop.

Given the fact that the primary reason for Windows on ARM is longer battery life, we’ll be interested to see what our testing shows. It’s possible that the MacBook Air M3 will retain its leadership in efficiency and provide significantly longer battery life than the Surface Laptop.

It’s as even as it’s ever been

The Surface Laptop is the best MacBook Air rival there’s ever been. For many years, it had the potential but never could live up to it. With the 7th Edition, the Surface Laptop improves performance, battery life, display, and trackpad. On top of that, it’s slightly cheaper than the MacBook Air and is more upgradeable, as you can swap out the SSD if you need to.

That’s not to say that it’s an outright win. The MacBook Air still gets better battery life and is considerably thinner. In that sense, it’s better at being an extremely portable little machine — especially on the 13-inch model.

For my money, I prefer the extra screen real estate of the 3:2 aspect ratio of the Surface Laptop, though you can’t go wrong with the MacBook Air either.