Hands-on with Microsoft’s Copilot + PC Surface Laptop and Pro

Microsoft unveiled the new Copilot + PC category and announced new Surface devices during an event at its Redmond, Washington campus ahead of Build 2024. The event was packed with bold claims about performance and AI capabilities, both for the new Surface Laptop and Pro and the wider Copilot + PC category, with some 20 new laptops announced by manufacturers like HP, Dell and more.

Following the event, I went hands on with several devices and demoed some of the new AI capabilities. It was tough not to be impressed, not so much with the AI, but with the slim, light new hardware on display. Unfortunately, so much of what Microsoft said about the battery life and performance capabilities of Copilot + PC devices couldn’t be tested in my short time in the hands-on area.

Still, all the pieces are there for these devices to be all that and more. I left the hands-on area with a feeling that the future of Windows PCs could be very, very exciting, even if you — like me — think AI isn’t the thrilling new development companies want you to believe it is.

Both new Surface devices come in four colours, ‘Sapphire,’ ‘Dune,’ ‘Platinum’ and ‘Black.’ They start at $1,449.99 in Canada and will be available June 18th. Notably, the Surface Pro doesn’t come with the new Surface Pro Flex Keyboard, which costs extra.

Surface Laptop

15-inch Surface Laptop (left) and 13.8-inch Surface Laptop (right).

It’s always interesting when one big tech company breaks out a direct comparison with another big tech company, and that’s exactly what Microsoft did during its event. It showed a couple demos pitting the new Surface Laptop running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip against a similarly-specced M3 MacBook Air. One demo was a battery life comparison showing the Surface Laptop outlasting the Surface Laptop 5 and the M3 MacBook Air. If you’re wondering why the new Surface Laptop isn’t called the Surface Laptop 6, Pete Kyriacou, corporate VP and Surface product manager, said that building up the numbers was getting too complicated. With the shift away from numbers, the focus can be on whether the customers want a Laptop or a Pro, and then selecting the hardware that works for them.

Live on stage, Microsoft also demoed the Surface Laptop outperforming the M3 MacBook Air in a photo processing test using Adobe Photoshop. In that, the Surface Laptop powered through images nearly twice as fast as the MacBook.

It was impressive, but it’s hard not to be skeptical with demos like this. Personally, I can’t wait to see how Copilot + PC devices stack up to the MacBook in real-world tests. I’m also curious to see how things change with other Apple hardware, such as higher-end M3 chips like the M3 Pro and Max, or against the MacBook Pro. Microsoft also wasn’t keen to make comparisons to Apple’s M4 given how new it is, though Kyriacou did say the X Elite’s NPU was better than M4.

My Arrakis. My Dune.

The 13.8-inch Surface Laptop is available with either the Snapdragon X Plus or X Elite, while the 15-inch model only ships with the X Elite. Memory options range from 16GB to 64GB, and storage options range from 256GB to 1TB SSDs.

While I couldn’t dig into performance and battery capabilities much at the event, I was able to get a good look at the hardware. The new Surface Laptop is very much a Surface Laptop. Microsoft improved the design without significantly departing from the aesthetics we’ve come to expect from Surface hardware.

The Surface Laptop sports a new display with slimmer bezels and rounded corners, offering a more modern look than previous models. It’s also quite thin and light, though not as thin and light as I had expected. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have a Laptop 5 to do a direct comparison with).

Surface Laptop powering three 4K displays.

Input still feels great, with that excellent Surface keyboard plus the new haptic touchpad. I’m excited to try that more in an in-depth review, but my initial impressions are that it’s quite good.

Ultimately, I wasn’t blown away by the Surface Laptop hardware. It has small, subtle improvements that make an already nice laptop a little bit nicer than before. The true story here is what’s on the inside, both in terms of the Snapdragon X Elite chip and the new AI capabilities, which demand more thorough testing.

Surface Pro

Like Microsoft’s new laptop, the Surface Pro received welcome but subtle design improvements. It’s still the 2-in-1 PC/tablet experience people have come to love but with a better display and improved internals.

Again, I had expected a thinner device but the new Surface Pro is the same thickness as the Surface Pro 9. This isn’t really an issue, but the way Microsoft was hyping up the new devices had me expecting a more significant redesign than what we got. That said, I’d prefer Microsoft stick with a similar design and offer an improved experience rather than pursue something like a crazy-thin device and possibly hurt the experience on the way. Maybe the next-gen Copilot + PC Surfaces will go for the crazy thin design.

Aside from the design, the Surface Pro now has an OLED HDR display option, which looks great. Additionally, if you want the Snapdragon X Elite, you’ll need to go for the OLED Pro — the non-OLED model ships with the X Plus.

Also of note is the new Surface Pro Flex Keyboard, which visually looks identical to the previous Surface Pro keyboards. The main difference is you can disconnect the Flex keyboard and use it wirelessly. It sounds like a small addition, but I think it’ll make a huge difference for the Surface Pro’s usability and making it easier to use in various configurations. The Flex keyboard’s connector can fold underneath it to form a small kickstand to make it a little more comfortable.

Total Recall

One of the big new features with both the Surface Laptop and Pro, as well as the other Copilot + PC devices announced on Monday, is the Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which enables various on-device AI capabilities. NPU performance is measured in trillions of operations per second (TOPs), and the Snapdragon chips powering Copilot + PC devices boast over 40 TOPs. Microsoft says that makes them the “most powerful NPUs on the market.”

The company detailed several new features that would leverage the NPU performance to enable new experiences and capabilities, but Recall was the one that stood out most to me.

Recall leverages the NPU to create a timeline of activity on a PC that users can search with natural language. On the surface (no pun intended), it sounds kind of creepy. Recall is essentially using AI models to monitor activity, such as by tapping into the graphics pipeline and capturing screenshots of events to build an index of activity with context. However, thanks to the NPU, this all happens on and is stored on the device. Users can also easily pause or disable Recall and exclude specific apps and websites (only in Edge, though Microsoft doesn’t seem opposed to other browsers adding support for this down the road). That means, for example, you can set Recall not to capture any activity that happens on your banking website. An icon in the Windows 11 taskbar shows when Recall is operating and provides access to the pause function and to other Recall settings.

The natural language search makes Recall particularly interesting. In one Microsoft demo, someone asked a question about a document with purple handwriting and Recall was able to find a Powerpoint presentation with handwritten, purple annotations. In another demo, Recall was able to find a conversation in Discord about a dress — that conversation also included a URL to the store that sells the dress, allowing the user to find and purchase the dress.

Recall also has settings for how much storage it uses up on your device. That’s a fairly important setting since constantly capturing screenshots of what’s happening on your PC can add up quickly. Recall is intelligent about when it captures the screen to avoid unnecessarily eating up storage — for example, if there’s nothing happening on the screen, it doesn’t capture anything. The default option for Recall is 25GB of storage, which Kyriacou said would be about three months worth of memory for most users, though that depends on how active a user is (more activity means more captures, and thus a shorter effective memory at a given storage level).

Of all the AI features Microsoft showed off, Recall was the one that seemed most useful to me. I still have to try it out for myself to see how effective it is, but I imagine having a searchable database of activity on my PC across apps and webpages would be incredibly helpful.

Draw with AI and more

Cocreator was also an interesting new feature, though I’m not sure how much I’d use it. Cocreator exists within Microsoft Paint and effectively allows users to draw with AI assistance by merging text prompts with sketches.

I tried this out myself by punching in a prompt for snowy mountains with a river and trees and then scratching out a frankly embarrassing sketch of mountains with a river. Cocreator managed to make an image that actually looked like snowy mountains and trees despite my poor artistic abilities. To me, Cocreator is a better version of text-based image generators since it offers the user a bit more control and input on the final product. At the same time, I think an actual human artist will always produce better art than these AI-generated images, but I could see Cocreator being helpful for less artistic people to brainstorm ideas to take to an actual artist.

Surface Laptop demo using just the NPU to generate images with Stable Diffusion.

Microsoft also highlighted Live Captions, which offers instant real-time translation from 44 languages into English. Live Captions will work across “any video or audio call,” which could be super handy for people who frequently meet with people who speak other languages.

Copilot + PCs also get improved Windows Studio Effects, which enhance your video on calls. New Studio Effects include style options, portrait lighting, eye contact, portrait blur and more.

Beyond these specific new features, the NPU powering Copilot + PC devices can also be leveraged by third-party apps. It will be very interesting to see how developers take advantage of the NPU to power on-device AI features going forward. On-device is a huge benefit as well since it means AI happens faster and doesn’t require an internet connection.

The future of Windows PCs?

After spending time hands on with the new Surface devices and trying out some of the new AI features, the future of Windows PCs is looking bright. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips are promising, the new Surface hardware brings subtle but welcome improvements, and it looks like we’ll finally get some AI features that are actually useful.

But as impressive as everything seems, I’m withholding final judgment until I’ve had a chance to try these things out myself. It’s one thing to see a cool new AI feature in a controlled demo, and another thing to try it out for yourself in an uncontrolled environment.

While the AI stuff was cool, what’s most exciting to me is that it seems like Windows on ARM might finally be a viable option. With the improved performance offered by the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, combined with things like Prism, the new emulation layer for running non-ARM apps on ARM hardware, it looks like Windows users will finally be able to get thin, light laptops that are still powerful and have decent battery life. Kyriacou said the goal was to make Prism’s performance as good as or better than Apple’s Rosetta 2.

If all these pieces come together right, then this next era of Copilot + PC devices will be a force to reckon with.