The Surface Laptop 13 isn’t particularly fast, but its battery endurance is simply exceptional.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Exceptional battery life | Windows on ARM is still a bit of a guessing game |
| Copilot Plus features including Recall are present. | General app performance is below par |
| Compact, travel friendly design | Camera isn’t Windows-Hello capable |
Score: 3/5
In this review
Surface Laptop 13 Design
Surface Laptop 13 Performance
Surface Laptop 13 Battery
Surface Laptop 13 Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Microsoft Surface Laptop 13 used in this review was loaned to me by Microsoft Australia, and it’ll be going back to them once this review is published.
Microsoft has had zero input into the content of this review; supplying the device gets it reviewed and that’s all.
This is as it should be, and yes, I know, disclosure isn’t sexy when what you want to do is get to the meat and potatoes of the review, but in a web that’s increasingly overburdened with either AI slop or ethically questionable “journalists”, I feel that this kind of disclosure is even more important. Herein ends the sermon, for more on ethics see here.
Design
Back when Microsoft launched its first generation of Surface devices – yes folks, I’ve been doing this tech journalism thing for a long time — I asked Microsoft representatives how they were planning to balance being their own hardware maker while keeping the big players in the laptop scene – the likes of HP, Acer, Dell and so on – happy.
The official position then was that they saw Surface as mostly a boutique offering for specific markets, and that they were happy for partner companies to somewhat use Surface as a bit of a reference platform. That did happen in some cases, but it also meant that Surface design, at least on the (ahem) surface didn’t really feel like it changed that much.
At the exterior, that’s certainly true of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13… sorry, strictly speaking this is the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13 1st Edition, because laptops are… collectible, maybe? I’m not sure why that’s part of the naming, and I know I’m digressing a little, but to be clear, I’m just going to call it the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13 from here on.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop 13 is built around a frame available in Violet, Ocean or Platinum finishes; the model loaned to me by Microsoft Australia was the darker silver/blue “Ocean” variant. The one catch here – and it’s a very familiar story for Surface devices – is that you can’t have your choice of internals and colours in every possible combination.
In Australia, the Ocean and Violet models only ship with 512GB storage at $1899, while the Platinum model comes in an optional 256GB variant for $1,699 or 512GB for $1899.
In line with prior Surface models, there’s no direct Microsoft branding on the Surface Laptop 13, just an embossed reflective Windows square logo on the lid.
Open it up, and you’re faced with a 13 inch 1920 x 1280 “PixelSense” display, a slight downstep from the 2304 x 1536 resolution of the 13.8 Surface Laptop 7 model that Microsoft still sells.
It’s touch capable, with a 1080p webcam sitting at the upper side of the screen bezel. The one curious omission here is that while other Surface units are Windows Hello ready for visual unlocking, the Surface Laptop 13 doesn’t offer that, instead relying on a simpler – and probably cheaper – fingerprint reader in the power button instead.
Also read:
Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 Review
The size of a 13 inch laptop will always limit what you can do with its keyboard, but here Microsoft hasn’t wasted much space and chosen a mostly sensible layout for those with productivity in mind. If you’re a frequent user of the Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys, then getting used to where they are on the function key row may take some getting used to, but alternatively, if you prefer a laptop layout that uses those keys for media playback functions, you’re plumb out of luck.
A lot of laptop keyboards leave me wanting – and honestly, long term I tend to throw a mechanical keyboard into the mix if I’m working long term with them – but the Surface Laptop 13’s keyboard has really quite nice travel characteristics, and the same is true of its mechanical trackpad, which responded nicely during my review period. I’m not a huge user of touchscreens within Windows – I find it’s too fiddly for my purposes – but the response there feels fine within my own limited testing scope.
There’s one other big point of difference between the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13 and any other Surface device, and that’s in the ports. The Surface Laptop 13 features dual USB-C 3.2 ports on the right hand side, a single USB-A 3.1 port and a combo audio jack on the left… and that’s all.
What’s somewhat MIA here is the magnetically attaching Surface connector that Microsoft’s had charging Surface devices all the way back to the original generation, though this isn’t the first Surface device that could charge from a USB-C connection with enough juice behind it. It’s just the first that can only charge this way.
I’m 100% fine with that; honestly I prefer living in a world where pretty much every technology gadget from games consoles through to laptops and beyond uses the same cables and the same connectors, because it means I can travel with one set of plugs to rule them all. I do get that some people like the convenience of the breakaway magnetic cable, however; if you want that, you’ll have to look to other Surface devices.
Performance
The Surface Laptop 13 sits in the lower tier of Microsoft’s Surface devices in a pricing sense – it’s not quite the cheapest, but it’s down there – and one of the ways that Microsoft achieves this is by using the slightly lower tier Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus processor as its sole internal choice.
That’s matched up with 16GB of RAM and either 256GB or 512GB of internal storage, though as noted above, the 256GB variant is only available with the platinum case version of the Surface Laptop 13. While Microsoft does have other Surface units running the Snapdragon X Plus, the Surface Laptop 13 keeps the cost low by shipping only with the 8-core variant of that system.
Being Snapdragon also means that we’re once again in Windows on ARM territory, relying on a mix of native ARM applications and Microsoft’s own Prism emulation layer to run – or try to run – x86 based applications.
That also means that some of my standard PC benchmarks, including PCMark 10 won’t run at all, so I can’t compare performance that way. 3DMark will run, but via Prism emulation, which introduces its own performance overheads into the mix. Copilot+ isn’t just limited to the ARM world, but to give some comparative context to the Surface Laptop 13’s potential. Here’s how it compares:
While the Intel-based Expertbook no doubt benefits from being able to run 3DMark natively, there’s still a pretty big gulf between the performance of the Surface Laptop 13 and every other Snapdragon X Elite based Copilot+ system, and this does flow through to general performance.
For its asking price, the Surface Laptop 13 does just feel slow, and of course there’s then the issue as to whether a given application is going to run under Prism or have a native ARM version. With the literally millions of Windows x86 apps out there, I can’t vouch for all of them, and while there are some notable efforts to try to track this, it would pay dividends to check that the apps that you use every day are actually likely to work, even if only slowly.
Being a Copilot+ system also means that you get access to Copilot+ features, which include the full live version of Microsoft’s Recall feature. Recall is a snapshotting application, but this isn’t to do with capturing images from web pages. Instead it takes a screenshot of your activity every few seconds, using AI to determine what’s going on so that you end up with a searchable and theoretically secure history of all of your Windows activity.
I’m on the record as not being a fan of Recall; it feels intrusive and introduces risks that I’d rather not take with my data, even though Microsoft (to its credit) did pull its initial release to harden that security before making it available to the wider Copilot+ world. It does function, and you can use it to find data that you’ve created – but honestly, I was quite happy to quickly test it out and then disable it entirely.
Battery
So far, so not-so-great for the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13, but then we come to battery life. The big promise for Windows systems using ARM processors has long been that you’ll get superior battery life out of them, but all too often I’ve been left wanting in real terms. Microsoft’s claims for the Surface Laptop 13 are quite bold, with the promise of up to 23 hours of local video playback; impressive for a smaller laptop if true.
My standard for laptop battery testing has long been to balance a harder test and a softer one, giving me a ranged figure that should show theoretical worst case and best case scenarios.
The challenge for ARM based Windows systems is that my harder battery benchmark is based around PCMark 10’s Gaming Battery benchmark. I’m not pretending that the Surface Laptop 13 is a gaming system; it just presents a sustained heavy workload… or would, if it could run on an ARM-based Windows PC at all.
Which it can’t, leaving me with only the softer local 1080p video playback test for comparative purposes. At least that lets me see how close to Microsoft’s claimed “up to” 23 hour mark the Surface Laptop 13 was going to hit.
Here’s how it compared:
For those who don’t want to do the mental maths, that’s slightly over 30 hours of playback, seriously over and above Microsoft’s own 23 hour estimate. It’s a stunningly good figure, albeit for a very lightweight usage scenario, and well above the previous best placed laptop in that test, its own sibling Surface Laptop 7 variant.
This is easily the Surface Laptop 13’s single best selling point by a long margin, but with the caveat that this is most likely to be the case if you need a system for a lighter workload over a longer period of time where recharging may not be feasible.
Microsoft does supply a small USB-C power supply in the box with the Surface Laptop 13 that can top it up quickly, and it’s played reasonably well with most of my other USB-C PD chargers during my review period as well.
Microsoft Surface Laptop 13: Alex’s Verdict
The Microsoft Surface Laptop 13 is a curious laptop, and one that, ultimately feels a little hard to recommend at its RRP.
Its battery life is truly exceptional, and if all you needed was – for example – a system for simple presentations over a long period of time where recharging it would be difficult, it could absolutely be an ideal prospect.
It’s just that once you get past the battery life, there’s not a whole lot that feels compelling here. The screen is more rudimentary than its sibling Surface devices, as is the webcam, and its overall performance doesn’t quite live up to what I’d want to see at its $1,899 asking price.
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