Andrew Cunningham
Microsoft has been trying to make Windows-on-Arm processors a thing for so long that at some point I think I just started to accept that it was never going to happen.
The first effort was Windows RT, which managed to run well enough on the weak Arm hardware available at the time, but came with a confusing new interface and couldn’t run any applications designed for regular Intel- and AMD-based Windows PCs. Windows RT failed in part because a version of Windows that couldn’t run Windows apps and didn’t use a familiar Windows interface ignored two big reasons why people continue to use Windows.
Windows on-Arm returned in late 2010 with better performance and a translation layer for 32-bit Intel applications. This version of Windows, mostly limited to oddball Surface hardware and a handful of barely promoted models from major PC OEMs, has been quietly rolling out for years. It’s improving slowly and gradually, as are the Qualcomm processors that power these devices.
That brings us to this year’s flagship Microsoft Surface hardware: the 7th edition Surface Laptop and the 11th edition Surface Pro.
These devices are Microsoft’s first mainstream flagship Surface devices to use Arm chips, while previous efforts have been side projects or non-default variants. Both hardware and software have improved enough that I feel I can recommend a Windows-on-Arm device to a lot of people without having to preface it with a bunch of exceptions.
Unfortunately, Microsoft chose to release this impressive and capable Arm hardware and enhanced software alongside a bunch of generative AI features, including the Recall screen recorder, a feature that became so radioactively unpopular so quickly that Microsoft was forced to shelve it to deal with underlying security issues (and perception issues arising from security issues).
The rest of the AI features are so redundant that I’ll ignore them in this review and get to them later when we take a closer look at Windows 11’s 24H2 update. This is hardware that’s good enough not to must buzzy AI features to sell it. Windows on Arm continues to struggle, but the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop — and many of the other Arm-based Copilot+ PCs that have been released in the past few weeks — are much better than Arm PCs were even a year or two ago .
Known from the outside
Andrew Cunningham
When Apple released the first two Apple Silicon Macs in late 2020, the only thing the company did no a change was the exterior design. Apple didn’t comment much at the time, but the subliminal message was that these were just Macs, they looked the same as other Macs, and there was nothing to worry about.
Microsoft’s new flagship Surface hardware, powered exclusively by Arm-based chips for the first time, rather than a combination of Arm and Intel/AMD, takes a similar approach: refreshed internally, unremarkable externally. They’re very similar to the recent (and current) Intel-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop designs, and in the case of the Surface Pro, they actually look identical.
Both computers still feature some of the defining elements of Surface hardware design. Both have screens with 3:2 aspect ratios, making them taller than most typical laptop displays that still use 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratios. These screens also support touch input via fingers or the Surface Pen, and still use slightly rounded corners (which Windows doesn’t officially recognize in software, so the corners of your windows will be cut off, not that it’s ever been a problem for me).
