I’ve used a few different Microsoft Surface laptops over the years, and I’ve never been blown away by the power underneath the hood. The good news is, the new models will be powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips, which should be pretty speedy.
The bad news is, they’re fairly expensive—but MS says there’s a cheaper version coming, with a miserable 8 GB of RAM.
A Microsoft blog announcement details the new Surface Pro and regular Surface laptop models, touting their potential to deliver “up to 35% more graphics performance than MacBook Air with M5” and up to 90% faster performance than the Surface 5.
The new, non-Pro Surface is a 13-inch machine available in 16 GB and 24 GB flavours starting at $1,500, but tucked away in the copy is mention of “an 8 GB configuration coming later this year starting at [$1,300]” (via Windows Latest). For reference, this would mean the bottom-of-the-range model wouldn’t qualify as a Copilot+ PC, despite having a 50 TOPs-capable NPU on board.
Microsoft has previously confirmed that Copilot+ PCs need at least 40 TOPs of NPU power, a minimum of 256 GB of SSD storage, and crucially, 16 GB of RAM.
Even if Copilot+ qualification doesn’t float your boat, 8 GB of RAM is pretty meagre these days. While MS looks to be making great efforts to speed up Windows 11 in the near future, this machine will have the same-sized RAM loadout as the much cheaper MacBook Neo.
And despite its unified memory architecture and a MacOS implementation, the Apple machine still feels a tad underequipped. Still, it starts at just $599, which seems to have made other laptop manufacturers a little worried about their pricing structures.
A $1,300 8 GB laptop sounds like a tough sell to me, even if it’s a pure business machine with a feisty Intel chip under the hood. As someone who stacks a horrendous number of tabs in my browser for work purposes, I regularly test the limits of my 32 GB desktop PC, never mind an 8 GB lappy.
Still, I suppose it’s reflective of the world we now live in. The memory crisis looks to be here to stay for quite a while yet, and no electronics provider is unaffected. Even a titanically large one like Microsoft, it seems.