Surface Upgrades: Surface Pro vs. Surface 7 editions of the Surface Laptop and why Microsoft’s saying it would be “faster” than an M3 MacBook Air

The new Surface laptops with all-new “AI” capabilities will be the talk of the industry over the next few years. The Surface Laptop (7th edition) and the Surface Pro (11th edition) are here. They both start at $1,000 and are available for preorder. Both will officially go on sale on June 18.

But Microsoft did claim at its May 20th Surface AI event that so-called “Copilot Plus PCs” will be “58 percent faster” than an M3 MacBook Air. The company wasn’t specific about whether this was Snapdragon X-equipped machines, but those are the first Copilot Plus PCs, so it’s possible.

The naming of the Surface Laptop is not the same as before. It succeeds the Surface Laptop 5, but instead of being called the Surface Laptop 6, Microsoft is going with “editions” and for some reason is skipping number 6. This is the seventh edition of the Surface Laptop.

Microsoft spent more time talking about the AI chops because it clearly wants these machines used for AI tasks. The company says the neural processing unit (NPU) in the Surface can carry out 45 trillion operations per second, or TOPS (that’s the number of mathematical equations it can solve per second). That’s twice as much as Apple claims for its Neural Engine chip. The M4 that’s in the new iPad Pro can pull off 38 tops, which is more than it. That’s impressive, though TOPS is a bit arbitrary since it doesn’t tell us much about workload being carried by the chip.

But don’t count on those numbers. The two companies give information on how they tested on their pages, but it’s not helpful for comparisons without real world testing. For instance, Microsoft bases the 20-hour number on playing a 1080p video on a Surface with 256GB storage, 16GB RAM, and a Snapdragon X Plus, with brightness set to 150 nits. An M3 MacBook Air was also tested and used a1080p video with a brightness set of 8 clicks from the bottom. It can be the same as 150 nits, but there is no guarantee.

The Surface Laptop and MacBook Air seem to be pretty similar at first glance. Both laptops are encased in metal and feature thin display bezels, chicklet-style keys, and big haptic trackpads.

Energy-Cost of MacBook Air and Surface Laptops: From Face Authentication to Touch ID Fingerprint Scanning in Surface and MacBook Air

The crucial factor in Apple’s performance has been how much power it actually uses to get there. Plenty of Intel and AMD laptops have offered better raw performance, but nobody has really touched Apple when it comes to the energy cost, at least until now.

The Surface Laptop uses Windows Hello face authentication, rather than a fingerprint sensor, for logging in. The MacBook Air, despite having a notch drooping down into the screen since 2022, has no Face ID and uses Touch ID fingerprint scanning instead, which works well, but still.

Both can get much spendier, though. You can purchase the pre-order 64 gigabytes of RAM 15-inch model with 1 terabytes of Solid State Drive for $2,499.99. For the same price, you can get a 15-inch MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM and 2TB SSD.