Surface Laptop 7

I've had the MacBook Pro 16" M1 and it was absolutely excellent. Replaced it last year with a 16" Surface Laptop 7 (Snapdragon ARM architecture) and that was not the best move.

[...] Almost 6 years later and there is still nothing on the market that: Has the same level of performance With the same or better battery life With the same quality of screen With the same quality of speakers and touchpad Runs as quiet or as cool as the Apple Silicon macbooks. [...] Either the speakers, screen, keyboard, touchpad, build quality, battery life, or thermals. I have a Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon X Elite, and it's pretty close. Checks the boxes for Screen, build quality, and touchpad. Loses out on speakers and battery life, and the fans need to run a lot more than my M4 Pro MBP does. It also loses on performance, and it doesn't run Linux. Windows on Arm also still has a lot of little quirks and bugs that start to become daily annoyances. [...]

[...] I tried the surface laptop 7 with the snapdragon X elite, and it's..OK. Still spins up the fans quite a bit and runs hotter than my 14" M4 Pro. It's noticeably slower than the MacBook too, and isn't instant wake from sleep (though it's a lot better than Wintel laptops used to be). So I've been on Apple Silicon macs for the last 4.5 years because there's just no other option out there that even comes close. I'm actually away from my desk a lot, battery life matters to me. I just want a laptop with great performance AND great battery life, silent, runs cool, high quality screen and touchpad, and decent speakers and microphone. [...]

After buying a desktop last year I sold my Thinkpad but I still wanted a laptop with a long battery life even if less powerful. I bought this Surface Laptop 7 sapphire color second hand because or RAM-pocalypse. A Snapdragon version to evaluate the ARM ecosystem […] [Original post on shelter.moe]

[...] I have the surface laptop 7 with that chip, and I remember it being made a big deal when photoshop & lightroom were ported. I believe Blender also had an arm build for windows a while ago too as did Davinci Resolve (as of 2024 I believe). [...] Sounds like its less convincing them to make an arm build for windows, but they are maybe taking advantage of some hardware specific features? [...]

I recently switched from a XPS 13 with tons of issues, replaced twice, to a Surface Laptop 7 on ARM64. Absolutely no regrets, it's so much better. They really need to focus on quality control.

[...] I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.

[...] I'm running the Tahoe developer beta, and in comparison to my Arm surface laptop 7, it's still light years better. I have no problems with Bluetooth, which is an endless struggle on Windows. I don't deal with windows update failures, windows installer service crashing and requiring a PC restart to install an MSI (happens constantly on the Arm devices), I don't have copilot being shoved down my throat, I'm not nagged to start an Office trial, or redirect my folders to OneDrive, or have ads in my app menu, etc. [...]

I just purchased the new Surface Laptop (7) coming from MacOS. I boot it up, ads are in the start menu, ads are in the weather app, ads are in the email application, ads are in the notifications, and edge’s start screen. [...]

Bonus for ARM based laptops. My Surface Laptop 7 can charge just using my iPad power brick. So long as I’m not doing anything process heavy.

I bought a Surface Laptop 7 this year for $1800, which was $800 off of their regular price. And now the exact same laptop (without a discount) is $3700. It's insane.

I’ve never had such a fast Windows laptop before. It’s fun to work with it.

[...] You changed the game for me. I was always a Surface Pro guy and was about to buy the 11 model but stopped and got the Laptop 7. It is INCREDIBLE!!!!

I just had buy the surface laptop 7 today and I can say I finally have a laptop that have everything that I needed.

I honestly really love the Surface Laptop 7. They've done a lot of good work with Windows on Arm and I still can't believe I'm using it as a daily driver

I got this for my mom office worker 100% need this great battery life basic apps works really well excellence build quality overall great for casual user and student

You mean the Surface Laptop 7 right? I got the 6 and it’s Intel crap with all the issues like abysmal battery life, thermal throttling and sleep issues.

I got a new Surface Laptop 7 for testing with a 12-core ARM64 chip and love it too. Just need to get these Neural Engine/NPUs to do more in Python now!

I bought the Surface Laptop 7 about 3 weeks ago and I absolutely love it so far. I love the size and weight, the touchscreen, the keyboard, no fan noise, battery life and the MacBook-like design! It fixes everything that I didn’t like about my Samsung GalaxyBook 4, that I took back after only 4 months.

I got my hands on a Surface Laptop 7 running on a Snapdragon X Elite chip (12-cores). [...] It's so fast that it fools you into thinking that Teams is a high performance app 😂 If you have any specific questions about the device, let me know.

Got my hands on a Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon Elite X processor. Really looking forward to take this for a spin and see how much Windows on ARM has improved since Surface Pro 9 ARM (which has been my daily driver since almost 2 years)

First impressions with the Surface Laptop 7: it’s really good! Battery life is stellar, standby and resume are instant like with my iPad, and I haven’t found compatibility problems so far. [...]

best laptop i owned, and i hadmultiple MacBook before, very efficient and quiet and snappy. pretty happy with it.

Ok so the Surface Laptop 7 is a nice piece of metal. I also really like how the battery lasts as long as my phone does. Wish it was convertible so it was easier to read manga on, but I guess that's what the Surface Pro line is for.

Probably a surface laptop 7. I have the arm edition with 32 gigs of ram and that’s been my daily driver and has been very reliable. If you’re going to be doing COM, I think you’re OK on arm, but you could also look at the Intel version of the same

My daily driver "laptop" has been an i7 Google Pixelbook from 2017. [...] It was between that or the Surface Laptop 7. [...]

this was a FANTASTIC review!! i just purchased the 15in SD elite version w/ 512gb on sale for black friday and am beyond excited to use it for work (excel and cloud based platforms mostly) and casual use. i don’t do any heavy gaming but also have a desktop for that if i want to, mainly just wanting a laptop that can handle a bit more than just the basics but not $2000+. after a lot of research this seemed like the best option for my needs and looked beautiful—i even feel more confident in my choice now! ❤

I am using this laptop for development only and its works fantastic for the price, I shall recommend this model for developers in your website

I got my surface laptop 7 in the base config since 2 months. I use it for my daily tasks and studying. I also work as a Software engineer, and every tool and app I used before my surface laptop 7 on a x86 laptop runs on it natively. [...] Because I use it for daily tasks (watching youtube, listening to music, watching movies and series), I also wanted to have good integrated speakers, and for my own use case they are more than I could have asked for.

have you been able to print ? if so, what printer are you using? I have had no luck finding drivers for win11 arm for canon or hp printers.

I have the X elite version and easily get enough juice to last more than a day easily!

This does look like a good laptop for me. I'm currently using a ThinkPad X1 Nano and a Chromebook as home computers (My job issues me a laptop and I only work off of it). Just wanted to mention it as a past Surface owner: It's nice to have the Surface Dock. It uses the Microsoft port so your USB ports remain free. I almost sold my dock on eBay, but keeping it around in case I go back to Surface.

[...] I loved the SL7 until I hit a software compabililty issues with a company that makes great PDF OCR for window and now Mac but NOT arm based. [...]

You said laptop gets warm when charging with type c, I also noticed it happening with surface dock 2 connector. Additionally, I would find the laptop after charging a few hours with lid closed (in sleep) while while connected to dock 2 connector it would be extremely warm and fan audibly running. I also noticed many graphic glitches mainly while connected to external monitors. MS Teams (arm version) had many glitches with worst being it needing reinstall multiple times because couldn’t open it (even after reboot). [...]

I know that Windows 11 doesn't get a ton of love on HN, but I have successfully replaced my M1 MacBook Air with a Surface Laptop 7. The build quality is great, and I even think that the Surface's haptic trackpad is superior. However, I don't think anything on the market beats the Macbook's speaker quality.

[...] I have the surface laptop 7 with the X elite in it. [...] Feels a little slower than my M2 Air I have but not much, most of that is probably just windows being windows. [...]

Beyond just build quality too. The $1k air has phenomenal speakers for a laptop, a great display (albeit, no 120hz), and a touchpad that is unmatched on any other laptop. [...] The only laptop that comes close is the new arm Surface Laptop 7, but - no Linux on that for now.

[...] But, I just can't tolerate the user hostile behavior from Microsoft, nor the stop the world updates that take entirely too long. [...] do and move to an immutable/read-only base and deploy image based updates instead of whatever janky patching they do now. [...] The Surface Laptop 7 (the arm one) comes close, but still not good enough.

I have a Surface Laptop 7 with 32GB RAM (the Costco edition). Software-wise as a user, no complaints. All the software I use (90% MS stack) works perfectly. [...] Moving to WSL, even that works fine, as long as the software you can get is ARM64 (as your WSL layer doesn't have an emulator). [...] The battery life is amazing. The charging port is MS' version of Magsafe, and adds safety. The screen is not bad, but not good either. [...]

[...] RaptorLake gets close (and beats) the M3 in performance in some areas, but not in heat or fan noise. [...] The new surface laptop 7 is pretty close hardware wise (except the keyboard) but it can't run Linux, sadly.

[...] So far I have a Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon which has blown me away in terms of battery life. I'm talking 10+ hours watching video on full brightness. And I'll happily sacrifice 50% of that for a better screen and a more powerful GPU. [...]

I feel so stupid. I bought a surface laptop 7 thinking I couldn’t care about gaming since I have a desktop for that. But my desktop has had a bunch of problems so it’d be nice to have my laptop as a backup but yeah 🙃

Been using a Surface Laptop 7 with Snapdragon X Elite lately and I gotta say I am REALLY impressed so far. But, I wish @frame.work would get ARM at some point, this device goes against all my principles of right to repair etc....

[...] I ended up getting the 13.8 inch surface laptop 7's plus snapdragon version with 16BH and 512GB SSD, especially thanks your insightful review on the surface laptop & your laptop recommendation for business/casual users. [...] Though not having OLED screen is a bummer, but a great premium package overall.

One month in and the Surface Laptop 7 just might be the best Windows laptop I've ever owned. [...]

I have been a macbook user for many years and just bought my first windows laptop (zephyrus g14), i have 2 weeks to test it or return it, wish me luck