Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop is a big moment for Windows on Arm. It’s also designed to be a true MacBook Air competitor.
The new Surface Laptop isn’t just a refresh. It’s Microsoft’s first clamshell laptop with Qualcomm chips inside, and it represents Microsoft’s most serious attempt yet at a transition to Windows on Arm. The company’s previous efforts at Arm-based Windows machines were flawed, with poor app compatibility and sluggish performance. Now, Microsoft is trying again to finely balance processing power and battery life in a way that only Apple has achieved in laptops so far.
These benchmarks show that the Surface Laptop can be better than the MacBook Air at sustained performance in apps. I ran a bunch of Blender tests, but the 3D app wouldn’t pick up the Snapdragon X Plus or Elite’s GPU, so the render was completed by CPU only and was much slower as a result. A 3DMark test also only ran emulated on the Surface Laptop, so the MacBook Air M3 was able to pull ahead by more than 30 percent in the result.
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