If you come for the king, you best not miss… 

No matter what side you are on, it is good to see competition. More choices for individuals.

The feet on the surface use a "mushroom" rubber plug to be reusable instead of glue or two sided adhesive. The screws are indeed under these feet. The bottom is magnetized on instead of plastic pressure snaps like the Mac use.

It's nice to see Microsoft finally making progress on ARM after so long and so many promises.

No adhesive on the feet, four screws and magnets instead of clips :)

"The bezels are uneven." *Glares at notch*

Doesn't the surface come with 16Gb RAM as base? How was that not mentioned at all?

Note: it's not their first attempt into the arm-for-pc competition. As a matter of fact, it's like their 5th (8cx1,8cx3,Sq1,Sq3 and now the X elite)

X Elite is pretty impressive!

You failed to mention that you get twice the RAM on the Surface.

Still though, its nice to see ARM windows machines that don't totally suck. And as a PC user that loves mac design language, and uses apple for work computers, a laptop like that would probably appeal to me as a nice ultrabook rather than a macbook air because windows has more versatility regarding software. Although I have a framework now so I won't be needing a new laptop for a while ha

This exact 13” M2 MacBook Air is now available from Amazon for $849.

I'm surprised you didn't mention that, at a time, Windows RT existed prior to Apple's M series of chips in 2012; they had an opportunity to get light-years ahead of Apple and didn't make the commitment for over a decade to really make it work well. It took Apple to showcase the sheer power of ARM to get Microsoft to make more investment. Their own fault they're now behind.

Just Having a Fan-less Laptop that comes close to the Performance of a laptop with a Fan is Impressive by Apple

You can't complain about one time adhesive when they allow you to repair almost every part of the laptop. Offering tutorials and parts as shown in Jerry rigs everything clip. You could change the ssd in 2 minutes without opening the laptop. That's not even comparable to heavily disliked Apple repair policies with their laptops. You overlooked some primary advantages offered by the surface.

Some of the tests are too bias and don't make much sense. For example, the battery life test running cinebench twice. Of course the MBA would do way better because it's using way less power, but as a result it's also way slower in that test as you showed yourself.

So I have a Surface Pro with the Snapdragon X Plus. In the week I've owned this computer, I've not heard the fan turn on once.

Some things to say, maybe next time you can be more objective. Is important to consider that Surface is not using big-little architecture, it means all the cores in the Surface are the same, but in Apple Silicon you have efficiency and performance cores, that contribuyes to a verter battery life but impacts on the performance clearly shown by Cinebench. Another fact is that actually 8Gb RAM nowadays should be really a criminal offense, I mean, I understand that MacOS is a UNIX based system and the RAM management is way better than in Windows, but really 8 GB is a bad joke. Enough for web browsing, some video calls, office related tasks or something that my grandmother would need to use, but not even for university students I would recommend the MacBook base model. Besides that I loved that you are one of the few reviewers showing the base model Surface performance. I mean, I think this is the only worth to buy machine from this new Qualcomm ARM computers, because there are still not a lot of software fully optimized. Also the translation layer does not work as nice as Rosetta in the very first MacBooks with Apple Silicon. Well, thank you very much for the effort to make the video.

One thing I hate about Windows is the pitching. Begins badly when they outright try to trick you into allowing data for ads (amongst other things). Then, low-level continual shilling in the taskbar, Start Menu and Store (I know the Store is supposed to be for buying stuff, but they still manage to shill nevertheless). Constant nudges to make Edge the primary browser (again, often in a tricksy manner) and now Co-Pilot has added to the clamour (and degraded performance noticeably).Then, after major updates, you get the big, tricksy push again. I have tried the de-trickyfying methods before and they do work pretty well, but not 100% (and always with the worry that it will mess up some directory or other). Now I've just settled into default OS mode. And ultimately, Windows 11 is worse than 10 from a UX perspective.

About battery tests, qualcomm laptops have 120hz screen but MB air doesn't. Did you test with 60 or 120 on Windows?

Blender already offers a Windows ARM beta version.

Surprised Luke didn't open the Surface. He would have loved the ease of disassembly and the user upgradable storage.

The snapdragons are already on the back foot against the M2 and soon M4 will be in Macs. Both companies will be giving each other stiff competition. This is great for consumers

It's interesting, how most reviewers say that this Chip was Qualcomms first attemt while it obvously wasn't. The Microsoft SQ chips were Qualcomm too. and if i remember correctly there was the Snapdragon 8180 in 2018 that was specifically designed for laptops.

Apple needs to start using a lot more 120hz displays and not saving them for the "pro" line up across all their devices

500k Soon! Well done Luke

Just FYI, it's not going to be Snapdragon vs Apple silicon. MediaTek is getting in on the race and other companies are rumored to follow.

Put charts comparing the two, viewers will love it

I usually allocate 2 days for Windows updates to completely finish on setting up a new Mac. I've not seen all of the ads that you're talking about but I've only installed the developer kits.

I believe the feet are clipped or magnetized in

Very glad to see that the Snapdragon X was able to compete against the MBA as well as it did, especially is ROTR. The performance was perfectly even between the two. But draining 3x the battery at full performance compared to the MBA is not good, so I hope the next-gen chip focuses on efficiency.

Hey Luke, just remember that Blender for Windows is an emulation app (it doesn’t have an ARM build so you’re running the x86 one) - this will impact performance.

What power profile was the Surface set to? There's Balanced, Performance, and Efficient. That doesn't include the Battery Saver mode either, so there's a fourth option too. I'm noticing a lot of discrepancies with reviews because of this. Only one person noticed this, and it turned out to make a huge difference with performance and battery life.

Windows laptops will drain dramatically more battery in standby if they were plugged in when put to sleep than they do if they're unplugged first. Windows will install updates, trim the SSD, scan for malware, etc while in sleep if it is plugged in, but not on battery. However, if it is unplugged while already in sleep, it will not correct itself. It's the difference between draining 5% per day and 5% per hour. Also, this is not the first time Qualcomm has made a chip for laptops. This is actually the 4th generation. But it is the first time they made a laptop chip that isn't just a phone chip with a higher power limit. The Qualcomm/Microsoft SQ# line of chips was decent for a fanless system with maximum battery life, but performance was half or less than comparably priced computers with AMD or Intel chips. I have a Surface Pro 9 with the SQ2 and the performance is just barely good enough for me; though I barely use it because tablets with keyboards make for bad laptops and Windows makes for a bad tablet. But for handwritten note taking or sketching and movie watching it's 99% as good as an iPad Pro.

I hope you didn't test the video playback as shown, the surface will obviously drain faster with more white and bright colors.

Hopefully in the not too distant future we get energy efficient gaming laptops with ARM CPUs. Imagine being able to game on battery for 6 hours+.

2:12 I really thought that was the Apple Store for a second lol😂

on this video I see "this is good, but my Mac still my fav"

Nice to see BeamNG in the comparison, love that game!

I would love to see something like that with a fully featured bios and being offered without an operating system for installing a native ARM Linux.

I am currently going through close comparison of my Surface Pro 8 and iPad Pro 2018 as an full featured full productivity away from desktop laptop/tablet hybrid. So far the Surface Pro 8 feels best but will wait until this fall to be sure. If I upgrade my Surface Pro 8 to a Surface Pro 11 (or this fall's Lunar Lake version) I will likely still keep my iPad Pro 2018 until future iPad Pro's come out when I will likely upgrade to an 11 inch that will function as a tablet rather than laptop.

What are you saying? The mac screen loos awful 5:07

Let's hope the next generation resolves fan noise, battery life, and graphic performance. However, it’s great competition. Congratulations to Qualcomm for attempting to bring the Apple Silicon experience to Windows users.

as someone who is very happy with my space black m3 pro it's good to see other companies take a shot at this kinda thing

What I'm seeing is good, healthy competition. That's a win for everybody.

The uneven bezels bother u, not the useless notch?

"Took 40 mins to update, hurry up I'm bored" Oh you mean like updating ANY Apple products OS? Don't get me started. Hey Apple ever heard of fast charging?

7:50 its translation not emulation, its not fully emulating an x86 environment, its translating the calls from x86 to ARM, there's less overhead in doing this which def makes a difference and thus it's worth noting the error in terminology

Is it better operating system i.e. better silicon. ?

Hard to believe that the Surface lost 35% charge over 20 minutes. You either have a faulty unit or battery calibration is off

The rubber feet have ZERO GLUE on them. It’s a new design and it’s glue-less. You obviously didn’t know lol 😂

really good video mate. most of the reviews have a favorite before even starting the video, this was rather objective and very informative.

Do you have a M1 Air to compare it to? Would be an interesting test. Thanks.

Note on battery life: Laptop 7 screen brightness is 600 nits vs 500 nits on the M2 Macbook Air. 20% more brightness needed to be sustained at 100%. Makes sense the battery life would be worse under similar workloads.

I have M1 Macbook Pro 13 2020, with 512GB SSD. I wanted to upgrade SSD and was told it is not possible. I purchased the cheapest Microsoft Surface pro 11 with 256GB SSD for 980 EUR and a replacement SSD 2TB WD Black for 150 EUR. All together is much cheaper than any Apple 2TB M? computer or tablet. Every platform has it's strength.

Excellent comparison. When the M1 chip was released I bought an M1 Pro for my daughter for college and the M1 MacBook Air for me. My daughter says the Pro should easily last through to graduation and I haven’t considered upgrading my Air. The only thing I’m considering right now is new iPads.

Do MacBooks have any troubles if you need to connect a printer?

RU-vidrs are like goldfish sometimes. 12:17 „This is their literal first attempt at building a laptop chip.“ Bro, What?! The 8cx processor lineup goes back to late 2018 and had three major entries before the X Elite. It predates the M Series of chips and was designed to compete with the AX chips of the time, like the A12X 😅

Apple reacting to the Microsoft surface battery life: "HA HA HA HA How Naïve"

When Luke said the surface got hot I thought of getting a Caution Hot Surface sticker for it...

Great comparison thanks. Let’s not forget the Microsoft SQ1 and SQ2 chips co-developed with Qualcomm though.

Is it me because the example used for the display made the surface laptop display look better.

It seems like Qualcomm needs to design their laptop SoCs from the ground up, like Apple did, instead of adapting their server SoCs down to a laptop. That will really allow them to match Apple Silicon much more closely in all metrics.

Thank you very much, it took me days to know wether they offer other colour for base model. Surely you are a time saver.

What was the brightness of each laptop when playing the 4k video? Why you leave important info like that out?.?

Yep. Still glad I switched to the Mac 17 years ago 😅

My main issue with the Snapdragon laptop is the fact it’s running Windows 11, with all the spying, upsells, and nagware Microsoft can put in it. Plus the taskbar is all wrong for me anyway and I’d like my start to be in the lower left again.

On your video playback test the background on the Mac was significantly darker than that on the Surface.

Didnt talk aboute battery life test was in perfprmance mode balance or power save ?

So Microsoft can have thinner bezels with no notch and a camera, but Apple, who has the best industrial designers, cannot design a screen without having a god awful notch.

For die hard Mac users like yourself, you would never switch to Microsoft, no matter what they made. I have never heard of Mac head say they can't wait to use Windows 11 instead of Mac OS. These new ARM laptops are for all the Windows users who can now stop using Mac OS due to the hardware.

Rounded screen was already there on Laptop Studio from 2 years ago.

I would be interesting to see how or if you can upgrade the windows with ram or a hard drive in the future?

How to use a Windows device: Step 1, turn on the device. Step 2, run updates. Step 3, use another device.

lol you wanna talk about bezels? What about the notch 😅🥺 I hate it

I think that choice really comes down to which OS you prefer. Both are very impressive. That's my opinion but heck, I have an iPad and iPhone that are great for me and I still love my Pixel too

Best review I have seen on these yet, thanks Luke!

No RayTracing. Glitchy. Still 2 years behind Macbook. Not worth the headache. Hard pass.

install linux

Hi Luke, Do you have any experience running Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon? It'd be great to see a comparison of these the devices both running linux once it arrives on the snapdragon. Keep up the good work!

Hi Luke, what mac would you recommend for programmers looking into the used market right now?

The feet are not one time adhesive, they pop in and out! So I feel like this is such a one sided test in so many ways Luke. I get you love Apple, but I own both M series MacBooks, and this exact X Plus laptop, and things like battery life are dependant on so many factors, like when you do the second video test the Mac is in Fullscreen and the Surface is not, the Surface screen is brighter than the MacBook so how do you make sure the test is equal? example, 50% Brightness is not the same on each laptop. The MacBook has a much bigger battery to start with compared to the Surface, What power mode are you in for these tests? This seems like a rushed video with bad test procedures in my opinion. You remember what M1 was like on initial release, hell I even watched your livestream during the announcement. But your videos are becoming more frustrating to watch the more and more content you put out! Sort it out please Luke. From a long term subscriber.

One thing Mac users should know about compatibility for ARM on Windows is that, while these Snapdragon SoCs are new, ARM on Windows actually goes back a lot further than ARM on Mac. Anybody expecting an Apple-like transition has actually already been disappointed, even if they don't know it yet. I write this as somebody who was supplied a Windows ARM machine from work a couple of years ago. Lasted about three weeks before we went back to Intel.

Good video. It's a shame you tested the battery life with the surface having more bright colors to show (the browser being windowed)

GOAT wire reference

Interesting review. Does the Surface have a plastic or aluminum case? I had a Lenovo 15 inch Ideapad that I bought in 2011 that broke it's hinge twice, the first time it was under warranty and the case was replaced by Lenovo, but the hinge mount to the plastic case only use's two screws on each side and in my opinion was poorly designed. My replacement 2013 13 inch Mac Book Pro having a aluminum case is a much better design and is more durable.

It also kills the M3, just depends on which X Elite chip you got.. And make sure power setting is set to performance... This differs a little bit depending on laptop manufacturer.

So far, the Copilot+ PCs remind me of the current iPad lineup. Very impressive if you use the apps made directly for it, much less so otherwise.

it would be great to see the performance comparison between the Surface and MacBook running Parallels

Battery life is key for me. Performance is important, and I noticed a huge performance improvement from my last Intel MacBook to my M1 MacBook, but I haven’t upgraded since then because I probably won’t notice much performance difference (in my day-to-day use) between M1 and M3. That Apple Intelligence stuff may compel me to finally do it, once it matures and it’s M5 by then. For battery life per charge, I use my MacBook like I use iPad. It’s mostly disconnected from everything during use, unlike my old Intel MacBook mostly connected to power during use. I connect my M1 MacBook when I get the 10% warning every two or three days, don’t think about battery too much otherwise. Your experience with battery life of that Surface is better than with Intel, but inferior to Apple Silicon, even my older M1.

Really nice products on both ends. I’m tempted to run a dual setup again 😅

Considering the MBA is a consumer laptop, I would say the Windows Snapdragon wins. Most consumers aren't going to be phased by the minor display advantages, heat, or even battery life. But to have everything a MBA has, plus Windows OS, PLUS a touch-screen... I'd say the Surface more than edged-out the MBA. And I'm a Mac Fanboy. ;)

10:50 well tbh the surface 15" did beat MBA 15" with M3 in battery test by 7%

The M4 one loving the iPad M4

Your battery test... Was that done with the same brightness on both?

And now the critical question. When will we have Boot Camp for Windows ARM back on our machines?

I agree with you. The Snapdragon ARM chips have made quite a bit of progress. I have a M3 MacBook Air with Windows 11 running in Parallels and was impressed as to how well Windows ran indirectly on the Apple silicon. As an Apple enthusiast of sorts I am hopeful that when ARM edges out X86 chips that more interchangeability will happen allowing PC software to run on a Mac natively... and this is a wishful thought, that Apple will end up giving up restricting touchscreens to tablets and phones but adopt them universally across all devices.

This devices will speed up arm implementation on windows drastically. And in 1-2 years, there will be a wide variety of good windows on arm laptops to choose for. Good for customers.

Best thing is the SSDs are changable unlike Macs

Can you connect an EGPU to the surface?

I’m not exactly sure how the translation layer works here but does that mean potentially we could end up in a world where windows for ARM works better on a macbook through bootcamp? 😅😂