Microsoft’s new 13-inch Surface Laptop is an odd one. It’s inarguably a step down in every respect from last year’s 13.8-inch Surface Laptop. But it’s also too good (and too expensive) to be considered a replacement for the Surface Laptop Go, the company’s perennially overpriced and underspecced entry-level laptop. It’s cheaper than last year’s Surfaces, but mostly because Microsoft gave those devices a de facto price hike by killing the entry-level configurations of those PCs.
We’re left with a laptop that’s perfectly fine or even great, depending on what you want. It’s relatively affordable for what is, a sort of MacBook Air-ish, just-the-basics portable computer. But it’s such a step down from the $999 laptop Microsoft released just last year that it’s hard not to see the entire laptop as one big series of compromises.
Where does the 13-inch Surface Laptop belong?
Despite just calling it the “Surface Laptop, 13-inch,” Microsoft clearly considers this to be an entirely different sub-class of laptop rather than a continuation of the flagship Surface Laptop or the lower-end Surface Go. The system identifies itself to Windows as “Surface Laptop 13in 1st Ed with Snapdragon,” where the 13.8- and 15-inch Surface Laptops are both labeled as 7th edition devices.
| 13-inch Surface Laptop | Surface Laptop 7 (13.8-inch) | Surface Laptop Go 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | 8-core Snapdragon X Plus | 10-core Snapdragon X Plus or 12-core Snapdragon X Elite | Intel Core i5-1235U (2 P-cores, 8 E-cores) |
| RAM | 16GB LPDDR5x | 16, 32, or 64GB LPDDR5x | 8 or 16GB LPDDR5 |
| Storage | 256 or 512GB UFS | 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB NVMe | 256GB NVMe |
| Screen | 13-inch, 1920×1280, 60 Hz IPS | 13.8-inch, 2304×1536, 120 Hz IPS | 12.4-inch, 1536×1024, 60 Hz IPS |
| Size and weight | 11.25 x 8.43 x 0.61 inches, 2.7 lbs | 11.85 x 8.67 x 0.69 inches, 2.96 lbs | 10.95 x 8.12 x 0.62 inches, 2.49 lbs |
| Starting price | $899 | $999 | $799 (launch), $949 (now, for some reason) |
In measurements and specs, this new Surface Laptop falls right in between the 13.8-inch flagship and the aging Surface Go 3. The new laptop also borrows components and ideas from both the Surface Laptop 7 and the Surface Go design. But in the end, this feels like a refreshed, Arm-powered iteration of the Surface Laptop Go rather than a more compact version of the flagship Surface design.
Internally, the 13-inch Surface Laptop is a scaled-back version of the flagship laptops Microsoft launched a year ago. Its 8-core Snapdragon X Plus processor uses the same architecture as the larger laptops, just with fewer cores. To meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ requirements, it has the same neural processing unit (NPU) as the bigger Surface devices, as well as 16GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of storage. Aside from storage and the color of the device, there are no upgrade options or choices to make. But unlike with the Surface Go, this does mean that the entry-level model is adequately specced and will feel plenty fast for most things.