It's lightweight, has Arm inside and runs Windows 11: a review of the ultraportable Microsoft Surface 13-inch 1st Edition laptop

Microsoft is pushing on with laptops that use Arm chips, gunning for that winning mix of devices that combine great performance with long battery life, to repeat the success Apple’s enjoyed by taking control of the hardware design.

It is a goal that has taken Microsoft over a decade. That’s because the company has written software for Intel style x86 processors since forever; Arm is a very different technology so much code has to be rewritten to work at all.

That’s all a bit nerdy, but the effort’s finally paying off for Microsoft. I’m happy to report that the laptop in this review, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch 1st Edition ultraportable, didn’t encounter any compatibility hiccoughs during the test period.

Looking at the specs of the NZ$2199 including GST machine that was sent to us, the Surface Laptop 13-inch is built around a highly integrated Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus system on a chip. Performance and battery life benefits from the integration, but like most other new laptops, upgradeability is sacrificed.

Graphics is through the built-in Adreno chip, and there’s a 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS) Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) for Copilot+ local artificial intelligence jollies.

Memory is fixed at 16 gigabytes, no doubt due to cost and battery life considerations. 

The fast solid state storage is removable and upgradeable however; the review unit arrived with 512 GB which should be enough for most needs, but if not, the device supports up to 1 terabyte. 

As the name suggests, the screen is 13-inches (measured diagonally). It’s a Microsoft PixelSense touch screen too, with 1920 by 1280 pixel resolution, and 60 Hertz refresh rate. Not the most hi-res display in the world, but quite adequate for daily use with a high 1000:1 contrast ratio and 400 nits (OK, candela per square metre then) brightness.

All the electronics were encased in premium feeling anodised aluminium (the review unit was a stylish grey) and the Surface Laptop 13-inch is nice and thin (15.5 mm) and weighs just 1.22 kg. 

With those dimensions, and the quoted 23-hour battery life, and it was pretty easy to reach numbers close to that with light use, the Surface Laptop 13-inch is very portable indeed. When you do need to charge it, it’s done through USB-C ports on the side.

So not the usual proprietary Microsoft magnetic charger, and you can juice it up with up to 60 Watts of electricity through the USB-C ports. It’s good to have common, standard ports for charging and expansion (two DisplayPort version 1.4a screens are supported, at up to 4K resolution and 60 Hz as well).

I noticed that the USB-C port was a bit finicky with either non-Microsoft chargers, and cables so I used the bundled 45 W wall wart.

Another gotcha with the ports that could matter for some users is that the Surface Laptop 13-inch only supports the older USB 3.2 protocol. Yes, I know, the USB naming conventions are infuriating and confusing.

The current USB 4 version is quite a bit faster, reaching up to 40 gigabit per second whereas 3.2 is 5, 10 and 20 Gbps, depending on which generation it is. 

There’s a USB-A 3.1 port too, which Microsoft likes to include on most of its laptops, which could be handy in some situations for older gear but doesn’t everyone use Bluetooth and cloud storage nowadays?

Speaking of input/output, the Surface Laptop 13-inch comes with fast Wi-Fi 7 wireless networking support. This is a very good thing, provided of course that the wireless network you connect to is also Wi-Fi 7. If so, you'll enjoy wireless performance with the Surface Laptop 13-inch.

Rounding off the specs list is a 3.5 mm audio jack for wired headphones, a keyboard that’s nice to type on with decent key travel and a nice big trackpad that’s not bad at all to use. In fact, the Surface Laptop 13-inch package is quite Apple-esque polished in terms of design and quality.

Actually, there’s more! A 1080p HD camera is included, making it easy to take part in awkward Microsoft Teams and Zoom video calls. You can use the Windows Hello authentication with facial recognition, and the laptop has a fingerprint scanner on the power button as well to let you into your account.

This is a Windows 11 Secured-core PC which means Microsoft has bundled a range of security features into it. It includes the Pluton security processor in the processor that supports the Trusted Platform Module 2.0 standard. I won’t go into what it all means, but it’s good stuff that will make hackers’ lives a lot harder.

The Home Edition of Windows 11 is installed on the Surface Laptop 13-inch, with Microsoft trying to sell you Office subscriptions which is tiresome and mars an otherwise clean setup that’s mercifully “crapware” free.

Local AI still feels half-baked

Being a Copilot+ PC, you get local AI features like the controversial Recall that creates searchable screenshots, Live Captions with real-time translation, Windows Studio Effects for the camera, and the Cocreator for Paint and Photos image generator.

They work, but feel shallow and not particularly transformative which was kind of the idea behind device-based AI. Well that’s what the marketing suggests at least. One day this might change but for now, Copilot+ doesn’t feel like a must-have feature.

Good performance and value

Modern hardware, particularly of the Arm variety, tends to be more than fast enough for general use. The Surface Laptop 13-inch is no exception, with the eight core Snapdragon X being a little quicker even than last year’s Surface Laptop 7th Edition, bar the graphics and AI scores in benchmark tests. 

For video editing and gaming you’ll want something beefier (and costlier) with better graphics and more memory.

With all-day battery life, decent performance and features, the Surface Laptop 13-inch is a nice and light Windows 11 ultraportable that’ll travel well for work and education. 

The Surface Laptop 13-inch offers fairly good value, particularly if you shop around and don’t order it from Microsoft, which will save hundreds of dollars, and holds its own pretty well against other competing brands.

It may have taken a while but the new Surface laptops show that Microsoft bet on the right horse by going down the Arm hardware route.