Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition 15 (2024) Laptop Review

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is available in a Platinum or Black color. See the bottom of the laptop here.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7's build quality is outstanding. Its all-aluminum chassis feels rigid, exhibiting little to no flex on the lid and keyboard deck. The display doesn't twist when manipulating it, either. The finish picks up small scratches from everyday use, as well as a fair amount of fingerprints and smudges, though this is likely less of a problem on the Platinum model. Although there's no glue holding the feet, they stay on with no issue.

The hinge is outstanding. It feels smooth when opening and closing the lid, and it's very stable. It has just the perfect amount of resistance, which lets you effortlessly make small adjustments and open the lid with one hand. The screen only wobbles a little bit when typing heavily.

Accessing the internals is easy; you only need to remove the feet and the torque screws beneath them to take off the magnetically-held bottom panel. The feet aren't glued on—you just need to use your nails or something small enough to get them off. The storage slot supports M.2 2230 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

• 65W power adapter and cord
• Documentation

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7's display looks very sharp and provides enough room for split-screen multitasking. The 3:2 aspect ratio is great for productivity; it's taller than the standard 16:9 and the more popular 16:10 aspect ratios, so you can see more information at once when reading a document or website. The downside is that you'll almost always have black bars at the top and bottom when viewing videos.

Although the display has a 120Hz refresh rate, its response time is slow, resulting in visible ghosting behind fast-moving objects. Dynamic Refresh Rate is a feature that allows the screen to change the refresh rate depending on your usage, so it’ll ramp up the refresh rate to 120Hz when you’re actively navigating the desktop, improving motion smoothness and input responsiveness, and lower it to 60Hz when the content is static to prolong battery life. Dynamic Refresh Rate isn't the same as FreeSync or G-SYNC, so you'll likely see some tearing when playing games with an uncapped frame rate.

The display’s contrast ratio is good and within the typical range of most IPS panels; however, it’s still low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7's display brightness is outstanding. It gets bright enough to combat glare in most settings, even outdoors in broad daylight. That said, you might still have some visibility issues because its glossy finish doesn't handle bright reflections all that well.

The display's reflection handling is mediocre. Its glossy finish struggles with bright light sources, like a lamp or open window during the day. These reflections are visible even with the screen at maximum brightness.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is decent. The image quality is good enough from the side for sharing casual content or text documents, but it's best to be close or directly in front of the screen if you need perfect accuracy for color-critical work.

The display's vertical viewing angle is decent. Again, the image looks dimmer and more washed out from above or below. You need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image.

The display's out-of-the-box accuracy is excellent. Other than the white balance being slightly off at higher brightness levels (too much red), the remaining inaccuracies are extremely minor and hard to spot with the naked eye. This accuracy level is good enough for color-critical work like photo and video editing. The posted results show the display's calibration with no color profile selected. Here are the measurements in the sRGB and Vivid color profiles:

sRGB:

• Avg White Balance dE: 2.84
• Avg Gamma: 2.15
• Avg Color dE: 1.57
• Avg Color Temp: 6410

Vivid:

• Avg White Balance dE: 2.85
• Avg Gamma: 2.15
• Avg Color dE: 1.58
• Avg Color Temp: 6425

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7's display has an excellent color gamut and is suitable for color-critical work like content creation. The system limits the color space to sRGB when there isn't a color profile specified in the settings. You must set the profile to 'Vivid' if you want to work in the wider DCI P3 or Adobe RGB color spaces. Here are the 'Vivid' color profile's measurements:

• sRGB xy: 99.98%
• sRGB uv: 99.91%
• Adobe RGB xy: 86.51%
• Adobe RGB uv: 92.79%
• DCI P3 xy: 97.96%
• DCI P3 uv: 98.86%
• Rec. 2020 xy: 70.95%
• Rec. 2020 uv: 73.22%

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 has an excellent keyboard. Its layout feels spacious and is easy to get used to, though the function row keys could be a tad bigger, which will make them easier to hit. Except for a few, most keys are very stable. They have a good amount of travel, require little force to actuate, and provide clear tactile feedback. The backlight is white, and there are three brightness levels, which you can toggle through using the F5 shortcut.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 has an excellent touchpad. While it could be bigger, it's large enough to use comfortably. Tracking is outstanding throughout, and palm rejection works as intended. This is a haptic touchpad, meaning it uses a haptic engine to simulate the clicks instead of physical buttons, so you can click anywhere on the touchpad. The haptic engine simulates the clicks well, providing clear tactile feedback.

The speakers get very loud with minimal compression at high volume levels. They sound clear and relatively natural, but with very little bass. There are no speaker grills; the sound comes through the keyboard.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 has an excellent webcam. The image looks sharp, detailed, and well-exposed, with true-to-life colors and tint. Some smaller elements look a little blurry, and there's a tiny amount of noise in darker areas, but these issues aren't bad enough to affect the overall image quality. Voices sound loud and clear over the microphone with no noticeable background noise.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 has an okay port selection. The USB-A port supports USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed of up to 5Gbps. Both USB-Cs support USB4 (up to 40Gbps data transfer speed), charging, and DisplayPort 1.4a. This laptop supports fast charging via USB-C as long as the charger has an output of 65W or above. The Surface Connect port is a proprietary port similar to Apple’s MagSafe, meaning the connector attaches magnetically. This makes the connector easy to remove, preventing the device from getting pulled off a table should you trip on the cable. Unlike previous Surface Laptops, this model isn’t compatible with Microsoft’s Surface Dock 2 (sold separately), which uses the Surface Connect port for data transfer and video output. However, it’s compatible with the Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock, also sold separately.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 2024's wireless adapter is a Qualcomm FastConnect 7800. Like Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7 gives you access to the 6GHz band but with even faster speeds and lower latency. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 7 to benefit from these features.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is only available with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-80-100) SoC, a low-power ARM-based SoC designed for ultraportable laptops. It can handle general productivity tasks like text processing, web browsing, spreadsheets, and video playback, as well as some moderately intensive workloads like programming, photo editing, and light video editing. That said, don't expect to get the raw processing power of a workstation or gaming laptop with a more power-hungry CPU and robust cooling system. One of the key features of this SoC is the NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which helps speed up A.I.-based tasks like Microsoft's Copilot and image generation in photo editing apps. Unfortunately, the number of apps that can actually make use of the NPU is pretty small at this time, so it probably isn't worth getting this laptop just for this feature.

If you're considering this laptop, the most important thing to know is that most programs don't run natively on an ARM processor. You'll likely be fine if you mainly use Microsoft Office apps or can access everything through a web browser, but for everything else, it's best to see whether the app has a native ARM version or will run well enough through emulation to get your work done. App compatibility will likely get better over time, as many software developers are working on a native ARM version of their apps, and there'll certainly be improvements to Microsoft's Prism emulation as well.

See more information about the Snapdragon X Elite chip here.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is only available with the Adreno GPU, a low-power integrated graphics processor designed to handle light productivity tasks like web browsing and video playback. You can play some games, like older or puzzle-like titles, but you'll have to play at a lower resolution or with low graphical settings to get smooth gameplay. Also, remember that most games lack support for Windows on ARM, so even if they work through Microsoft's Prism emulation, the performance will vary wildly from one game to another.

You can configure this laptop with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of soldered RAM. The 64GB option is only available on the Black model with 1TB of storage.

You can configure this laptop with 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage, though the 256GB option is only available on the Platinum model. The storage is user-replaceable; the slot supports M.2 2230 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 scores well in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. The posted results show the performance in the Recommended power setting. Switching to the Best Performance mode increases the single-thread score to 1,926 (+23%) and the multi-thread score to 14,282 (+4%). This puts the Snapdragon X Elite's single-thread performance about 20% behind the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2024)'s base M3 (8-core) SoC, while beating it in multi-thread performance by 36%. This level of performance is suitable for a variety of productivity tasks, including some demanding workloads like programming.

As for the GPU's performance, although Geekbench 5 runs natively on ARM, the GPU compute test doesn't currently support the Snapdragon chip's Adreno GPU, which is why our 9.9 score is abnormally high and isn't representative of the SoC's actual performance. We've performed additional benchmarks in Geekbench 6 to get a better idea of the GPU's performance, and as expected, it performs poorly and isn't suitable for demanding tasks. Here are the results in Geekbench 6:

• CPU Single-thread: 2,830
• GPU Multi-thread: 14,347
• GPU Compute: 19,944

Cinebench R23 doesn't run natively on the ARM-based Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, resulting in unusually low numbers. As such, we've performed additional benchmarks in Cinebench 2024, which has a native ARM version. Here are the results:

• Single-thread (Best Performance): 123
• Multi-thread (Best Performance): 935

Similar to the Geekbench benchmarks, the Snapdragon X Elite chip is behind Apple's base M3 (8-core) SoC by 15% in single-thread but 32% ahead in multi-thread performance. This performance level is suitable for fairly demanding workloads, but again, performance can vary wildly, depending on whether the app runs natively on ARM or through Microsoft's Prism emulation.

While you can render 3D images in Blender using the CPU, getting a laptop with a discrete GPU is best, as even an entry-level GPU, like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050, can render images much faster. This version of Blender doesn't support GPU rendering with the Snapdragon X Elite's Adreno GPU.

The Snapdragon X Elite's Adreno GPU is an integrated graphics processor designed for light productivity tasks, so don't expect to play any graphically intensive games. You can play some simple, puzzle-like games or older titles, but you'll have to play at a lower resolution or with low graphics settings to get playable frame rates. Also, since most games don't run natively on an ARM processor, the performance will vary significantly from one game to another, depending on how well the Prism emulation layer works for a particular game. Switching to the Best Performance mode increases the Basemark score to 30,371, roughly a 10% performance boost.

Borderlands 3 isn't playable on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7. The Snapdragon SoC's integrated graphics aren't powerful enough to handle this and other similarly demanding titles. Also, the game doesn't run natively on an ARM-based processor, so there's likely some performance loss from running it through Microsoft's Prism translation layer.

Civilization VI runs terribly at 1080p. You can get over 30 fps with low graphical settings, which is enough for a strategy game such as this, but the gameplay is still choppy, and the average turn time is quite long.

Counter-Strike 2 isn't playable at 1080p. The gameplay is extremely choppy, even with low graphical settings.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs poorly on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7. Although you can get over 30 fps with low graphical settings, the gameplay is still very choppy due to frame drops. The Snapdragon X Elite SoC's integrated GPU can't handle this and other similarly demanding.

See the thermal image of the bottom here.

We can't test the performance over time because the software we use to perform the test isn't compatible with Windows on ARM. That said, there's likely some thermal throttling, which is typical for most thin and light laptops.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 2024 doesn't have any pre-installed software applications other than those that typically come with Windows 11. As mentioned in the CPU section, this is an ARM-based device, meaning some apps might not work or run properly. It's best to check whether the apps you use have a native ARM version or can run well enough through Microsoft's Prism emulation to get your work done.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 2024 has a Windows Hello IR facial recognition camera. You can use it to log in quickly, authorize purchases in the Windows Store, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.