www.theverge.com/2024/6/25/24185462/microsoft-surface-laptop-7th-edition-review
Surface Laptop review: Microsoft’s best MacBook Air competitor yet
ReviewI’m not saying this laptop is bad, but article is written by The Verge… Have they figured out yet how to install RAM into motherboard?
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11d
I think its pretty clear it means the closest one through each generation.
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11d
"YET"
reading comprehension website
Better 120hz display and 16GB RAM over the base MBA. Not bad at all for 1k. But whats with these weird 13.x inch displays, just make it 14...
It's 3:2 display, so the different in area is not much
Still a pathetic 256GB of storage on a $1000 laptop. Both Apple and Microsoft are milking people on upgrades despite trying to sell 'premium' products.
At least on this, it's user-replaceable. You can go get 2TB for under $150
Then sell it with empty slots instead of this straight-to-landfill e-waste
No manufacturer would want to support empty slots. The average person would order it because it’s cheaper, receive it, then contact support because it won’t boot.
Schenker and Tuxedobook offers 2 empty NVME slots in their configurator.
Legit never heard of them in my life.
And yeah landfills are bad but that's not the only option. Resale is a thing, or keeping it and using it externally.
IMO it's nicer to be and to landfill an SSD vs an entire laptop just because the SSD fills up or dies
Probably because they're both European. KDEBook and EuroCOM both have SSD-less options.
But if you're from US, landfill is lyf I guess
Lol so you didn't read the rest of my comment then I guess
About what? Selling the SSD? Who in the blue heck wants to buy a 256GB SSD
It's ecocriminality to manufacture SSDs smaller than a TB and even 1TB is BS these days, at least put it in a CFExpress camera card, at least there it can last a day.
As long as Apple keeps getting away with it, everyone else will follow suit.
The PPI on the Surface Laptop displays is on the low side though, at 201 PPI. I think this is one spec where Apple displays have lagged behind the PC competition (current model MBAs and MBPs are 224 PPI and 254 PPI, respectively), so I was disappointed to see almost all of the announced X Elite devices sporting even lower PPI panels.
I’m sure these lower res displays help nudge the battery life numbers higher (and demand less of the kind of lackluster X Elite GPU), but I really value sharp and crisp text rendering on a productivity-focused ultrabook/thin-and-light laptop. I wish that these devices had the option for 4k-ish panels.
I cannot possibly imagine why you think you need more on a 13" display. I have a 4K 15" laptop at work and run it at 200-225% display scaling, my MacBook at home looks the same because you can't see the pixels anyway and you're using display scaling still. Driving more pixels is a waste of battery and processing power on that size a screen.
I would like to hear your reasoning though, as maybe I'm just out of touch. But I've seen a lot of 4K laptops getting the resolution dropped to more reasonable QHD/QHD+ instead with much better devices as a result.
I have a 4K 15" laptop at work and run it at 200-225% display scaling, my MacBook at home looks the same because you can't see the pixels anyway and you're using display scaling still.
Like I said, I really value text clarity. Even if you can't see the individual pixels, you can still notice the effects of higher pixel density at normal viewing distances. If you put your work laptop next to your MacBook, you should be able to notice that size-matched text on the MacBook is not as sharp looking and that there's more noticeable color fringing on high contrast edges (like black text on a white background). The difference is even more pronounced if you hold a modern smartphone (which often have >400 PPI displays) next to your MacBook and compare similarly sized text at normal viewing distances. As PPI goes up, text quality approaches printed text with less color fringing and sharper and more legible typographical features.
All of this is independent of display scaling, as it has to do with the pixel density, not the logical (scaled) pixel size of the display.
I know that a lot of people don't care about (or notice) this stuff, which is why I expressed that I wanted the option for a higher PPI display on more models. I really think the current MBA PPI should be considered as a baseline for high PPI displays, so it's disappointing to see almost every X Elite device release below that bar.
I think MacOS may be better at rendering text on any display. On the same external monitor MacOS text, lines, edges , etc looks way better than Windows.
Macs fonts rendered with anti-aliasing might look better to you, but it is not easier or better for eyes than ms clear type.
How so? May be biased because I have an OLED monitor but the text is legitimately much sharper on MacOS. It’s much easier to read text and it looks legible from further away.
Clear type is sharper, while smoothing is smoothing. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-anti-aliasing-and-sub-pixel-rendering/
No idea how well clear type works with oled because different subpixels layouts.
Don't forget to calibrate clear type when using windows.
Look, I believe you if you say you can tell the difference, but I certainly can't, at least not on reasonable sized text for this size a screen. I think you're asking for something which has very, very minor benefit for the vast majority of customers, compared to the tangible and easily noticed downsides. Considering that I've seen several devices ditch 4K options to go for the much better balanced QHD(ish) resolutions on the subsequent model, I wouldn't hold your breath.
I get display scaling if you are connecting to a TV you look at from the other side of the room. With the screen being as close as a laptop, i would never do anything but 100%
I’m sure these lower res displays
Surface Laptop 7 2304×1536
Apple's is 2560 x 1600, it's not that different...
Apple's is 2560 x 1600
2560x1664, but w/e.
That's a ~20% difference in pixel count in the wrong direction, IMO.
Usually it's pointless to give a very high resolution screen that then spends 99% time with 200% scaling on.
The point is clarity, not real estate.
Clarity is not only resolution, and that resolution quickly starts to give diminishing returns.
Not everything is scaled. you can scale UI without scaling the thing being displayed.
Yes, you can watch 4K 1:1 and it will look better on a 4K display but also things will get small - smaller text and so on. Depending on use case it's an advantage or not.
Tom says in the comments that they will have a follow up benchmarking article.
On the first day, I was working outside with 100 percent screen brightness, downloading multiple Steam games, attending video calls, and working in Photoshop regularly. I managed to get around seven hours of battery life in total.
I very much doubt this because even my M3 MBP struggles to get 6 hours with this kind of usage. I do content creation which requires me to use adobe premiere & photoshop like a lot and that coupled with working outside at an open coffee shop only lasts me a little bit over 5 hours before I have to find my charger.
so is the Qualcomm chip good or not
Good - yeah! Market changing - no Beating/reaching apple SOC level of efficiency and performance (it was marketed this way) - no
Wether you want to take up x86 compatibility trade offs for that is up to you.
yeah the boost in power efficiency isn’t worth trading off compatibility for
From what I've heard GPU performance is underwhelming compared to what Intel/AMD offers and the software support is not there yet. Things may get better as more devs support ARM and drivers get better. But one thing for sure is that all the current Snapdragon X Elite/Plus offerings are way too expensive making it hard to justify buying it.
I'm not sure that they're too expensive given what the base models offer, but it's definitely something that should be treated as if it was a first gen project.
Isn't this like QC's 4th generation WoA "project?"
The CPU on this generation is from a team they bought so pretty much none of their previous gens stuff is even relevant
Yes, technically the 5th. This is why I say "treat like".
Most of the previous SoCs' performance wasn't worth a damn, and Microsoft has been struggling to get ARM64 support and x86 emulation going since they can't axe entire generations of software like Apple can. While it's fair to throw crap at them, I do recognize how much more difficult it is to pivot a gargantuan software project like Windows and the NT kernel to another architecture. Especially when you don't have control over all the aspects of the hardware, and can't really force developers to stop using existing APIs to move to new ones.
It's a first gen product in the same way Intel Alchemist was a first gen product
Every review of it has been positive. The only issue has been compatibility with x86 apps.
Good for?
It has some good accolades: highest IPC core on Windows today with great 1T efficiency. But, ARM64 compatibility, missed CPU perf targets, relatively weak iGPU w/ misleading Qualcomm marketing, and funky OEM decisions do discolor the bright spot of Oryon as a CPU uArch.
More interested in AMD's upcoming Kraken Point for a thin and light, 8 Zen 5 cores is more than enough for a thin and light, and faster than a Steamdeck (8CUs, same as Steamdeck, but at higher clockspeeds).
But mostly because it looks like it could fit in a 9w tdp fanless Ipad Pro competitor, that's what I'm waiting for.
When AMD or Intel truly give us a tablet chip that performs well in battery life, i will be suprised. As of this moment, just to decode video, AMD and Intel use 3x the power of Apple and QC
As of this moment, just to decode video, AMD and Intel use 3x the power of Apple and QC
Where can I read about those power figures?
in QC Elite X reviews, they measured power for decoding 4k video. I would have to go through the vast amounts of reviews I read
This is not true. Video playback comparison normalized for battery size gives this power usage: https://i.imgur.com/OvJMm9P.png
Edit: The data was collected by a notebokreview and posted in another thread, i just made the graph.
Definitely this is what I’m waiting for for the X Elite
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11d
That's not correct.
Apple moved away because they love vertical integration, it's literally why Tim Cook was chosen to be CEO. Moving to ARM meant they could save money, and have even more control over their hardware, and they already laid the groundwork via their A series chips.
Microsoft started pushing ARM long ago with Windows RT, for two reasons, first was that AMD's bulldozer made it clear AMD would not be competitive with Intel for years to come, and second being that we were still in the days when people thought tablets and ipads would be in every home. Microsoft did not want to be tied exclusively to Intel, so they slowly pushed for ARM development. Now that AMD is back to being competitive, and Intel will probably challenge the M4 with Lunar Lake, ARM actually isnt important to them, but it makes no sense to kill the project at this point. Microsoft got the outcome they wanted regardless of if WoA sells or not.
But their expensive series is pretty disappointing, just saw max tech latest video and acc to it, it made 0 sense to get surface
What a slow and sponsored joke
It's nonsense comparing the hardware when one OS is practically adware.
That's not an argument against the hardware
Don’t worry Apple and Google aren’t far behind (though the latter is already there)
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Another positive review. In the comments Tom said this laptop is now his primary. Also interesting is that he chose to review a lower end "plus" snapdragon model so for anyone interested in how those perform this you may want to read this review.