I got a new laptop and I’m gonna gush about it for a bit. Thank you for your time.

The Good

It’s so fucking snappy. The 120hz display helps with that perception, but the ARM64 processor itself just flies. It’s night and day comparing it to my old Surface Pro 7. It’s handling so many apps and games super well. I have not thrown anything like Baldur’s Gate 3 at it, because.. 1) I don’t have BG3 and 2) I’m not that kind of PC gamer. I don’t play the big flashy AAA PC games. But this WILL run tons of indie games way better than my old laptop, and that makes me happy. Further, it runs all my apps super well, including my web browser which felt chunky on the old one, and it runs Godot like a dream. Which means I can start branching out into non-PICO-8 avenues of game development!

During set up, I found myself with a dozen different applications open, two dozen explorer windows, multiple large network file transfers, and many many many web browser tabs. And it didn’t hitch AT ALL. My SP7 would have been drowning! I didn’t even realize I had so much open because it just didn’t have any noticeable effect at all! Holy shit

A surprising number of my apps have native arm64 builds, but many don’t and I can’t tell the difference. The emulation is super solid and transparent for applications. Though there is one app and two games that I can’t get to emulate right, as you’ll read later.

The trackpad is HUGE. FINALLY a Windows laptop with a Mac-sized trackpad. And the speakers finally start to rival MacBooks too! They’ve got depth.

The display is gorgeous. It keeps the 3:2 aspect ratio that I fell in love with on the Surface Pro 7 and stretches bigger, with a bigger resolution to match. They’ve also rounded the corners of the display, which I think is a really cute touch to match the rounded corners in Windows 11. It gets much darker than my SP7 and much MUCH brighter than my SP7. I also find that I tend to keep the brightness of the laptop much lower than the tablet in the same lighting. This panel also has way more brightness steps than the tablet’s panel

And that’s not even getting into the fact that it properly supports HDR (my SP7 said it did, but.. didn’t really). I don’t use the HDR though because it fucking burns my eyes.

The battery life is wild. I easily go a full day between charges. And I AM using this thing a lot. I can transfer tons of data over wifi, play games for hours, play music, browse the web, and by the time I’m going to bed it’s at 30% still. The SP7 would need to be basically plugged in to make it through the day with the same activities. This is definitely an ARM benefit right here.

I really feel like I finally have a proper modern laptop that can sit next to my wife’s M3 MacBook Pro or my girlfriend’s M3 MacBook Air.

Copilot AI garbage was very easy to remove, and Recall has not yet been deployed.

The No Strong Feelings One Way Or The Other

The trackpad is haptic, just like the Macbook. This means that it does not move, and simulates the tactile sensation of a press using haptic feedback. It fools the shit out of me, and it makes for a sleeker device with fewer failure points I guess.

It came with Windows Home. The Surface Pro 7 was the first Surface device to ship without a Windows Pro license, which is confusing for a device named Pro.. But that’s Microsoft for you. The only benefit I would truly gain from a Pro license would be letting my laptop act as an RDP server, which I see no need for – I’d rather have my SP7 act as an RDP server while I’m still migrating from it, but that’s a temporary need anyway. I would also get HyperV support, but.. what would I do with that.

Speaking of HyperV, Windows Subsystem for Linux is bound to the architecture of the host CPU. This means I cannot take my WSL image from my tablet and drop it on the laptop and just run it. The image imports just fine (there really should be a check), but when it tries to boot it barfs because of tons of missing instructions. Because it’s running an x86_64 kernel. So, I need to start from scratch for my WSL image, which is I guess an inconvenience, but I’m not too put off by that. My WSL image had been getting crufty and bloaty for a while anyway.

The Bad

The 32GB model only came in black, and it looks like a fucking MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. I love the way the Surface Pro (the tablet line) looks, especially with the Alcantra keyboards, so it’s such a shame the Laptop line does not have a unique design at all.

I have the 13.8” model, which comes with a 39W power supply. The 15” model has the full 65W supply. My five year old Surface Pro 7 tablet came with that very same 65W power supply. So I can just use my old one, since the MagSafe Surface Connect port is the same, but it’s a bummer to be given a weaker power supply.

x86 and x86_64 emulation falls short with three programs so far:

1. Aseprite 64bit version only runs as admin, or else it just crashes; this does not make sense to me. The 32bit version runs just fine as an unprivileged user.
2. Typing of the Dead (2000) has a bunch of issues not properly displaying transparent textures.
3. SimCity 4 (2003) just straight up does not launch no matter what emulation options I poke at at all.

The Surface Laptop does not support the Surface Pen, but the OS and settings are still littered with stuff for the pen. Further, Whiteboard is installed by default. I wish it would let me use my pen! Just because it’s not a tablet like my Surface Pro doesn’t mean I should be locked out of pen! This means for any sprite work I will have to pull out my tablet to use my pen.

Finally, the left speaker in my particular device is muted more than the right, and certain frequencies heavily favor the right speaker. It’s a super bummer. I don’t think I wanna kick up a fuss about it though. I’m tired and I just want to use my new laptop.

Update: Upon further consideration, some frequencies seem to favor the left speaker too. Piano notes definitely, for example. Do I have faulty speakers, or is this some weird design thing? I can’t imagine having lopsided stereo sound was on purpose.

In Conclusion

This thing rocks, I’m very happy with it, and my wife is the ABSOLUTE sweetest for buying me such a high end model. Initially we had been waiting for the next models to be announced in the spring, but now that Trump is gonna be president and he’s gonna fuck up the economy by instituting tariffs, we decided to get me a new laptop now. To compensate, we got a really really beefy one so that it would last me as long as possible. Apparently these things also go up to 64GB of RAM, but the only thing we have that much RAM in is our hypervisor. I could not justify 64GB of RAM for a laptop lol.

When I had initially purchased my Surface Pro 7 in 2020, I had just been fired and needed a personal laptop. Having no income, I purposefully underspecced the device. 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, the weaker i5 chip instead of an i7 or i9. In hindsight, not a great move, especially because I was fine financially once Unemployment kicked in. I could have specced it up, but I was kinda scared and not thinking. I’m glad we did not make that mistake again.

The end.