Surface Laptop Copilot+ hands-on: Quietly powerful
It's still very understated, but now it's also a far faster AI PC.
The Surface Laptop has always been a bit of an anti-revolutionary device. After Microsoft struggled to make a splash with its original Surface tablets, it was created as a more mainstream option for less courageous consumers. It simply a Windows laptop, albeit a well-designed one.
The same is true for the new Copilot+ Surface Laptop: It doesn't look very unique at first, but spend a bit of time with it and you'll notice the attention to detail around its case and keyboard, or the way its thin new bezels highlight its brighter screen. And together with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips, it's also far more powerful than before.
Aside from those slim screen bezels, though, it's easy to mistake the Surface Laptop for any Microsoft's previous models. The only tell is the Copilot buton on its keyboard, which opens up Microsoft's AI assistant to do your bidding. Just like the new Surface Pro, there's plenty of potential for the Surface Laptop to be an AI powerhouse, especially with features like Recall, which aims to remember everything you've ever done on your PC. But it's just hard to tell how successful it'll be in a brief hands-on.
In one demo at Microsoft's campus, I watched as a representative used CapCut to remove the background from a video featuring several dancers. Within a few seconds, the app was able to insert a more dynamic alternative. It's the sort of thing you can do manually, but it would take a long time to separate every dancer and map them onto a new background. Thanks to the Surface Laptop's neural processing unit (NPU), it can intelligently carve out the dancers and place them on a new stage.
The new Surface Laptop Copilot+ AI PC starts at $999 for the 13.8-inch model with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and a Snapdragon X Plus processor. You can upgrade to the more powerful X Elite chip for an extra $300, and you can also add a 1TB SSD for an extra $200 on top of that. The 15-inch Surface Laptop starts at $1,300 with the X Elite chip.
Catch up on all the news from Microsoft's Copilot AI and Surface event today!
