Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 First Impressions

Two weeks ago, Microsoft delivered the Surface Laptop 7 I had preordered to my place in Pennsylvania. Yesterday, I finally opened the box: We had been in Mexico at the time, and we didn’t fly home until then, forcing me to wait to see whether my expensive new purchase would live up to my expectations.

So far it has. But let me push through some negatives because they were immediately obvious when I first opened the box.

At first blush, Surface Laptop 7 is exactly what I expected, a premium knock-off of Apple’s iconic MacBook Air that both measures up, and falls short, when compared to its inspiration. I’m reminded of the terrible Steve Jobs quote about Microsoft not having any class, delivered vindictively from his perch at the nadir of his career in the mid-1990s: Surface Laptop delivers a MacBook Air-like look and feel from a distance, but the closer, you look, the more you see the lack of attention to detail for which Microsoft is famous.

This won’t impact usage per se, but I suspect most wouldn’t even notice these sorts of things. But when you pay over $2100 for a laptop, it’s all about the details: You expect a premium experience. And here, Microsoft has some work to do.

The most obvious example is the display corners. In keeping with the rounded corners of windows and controls in Windows 11, Microsoft and its PC maker partners are selectively introducing similar curves to the corners of laptop display panels. This can be a nice look, though many early attempts aren’t particularly smooth, where the corners have a visually jaggy look. In this case, the Surface Laptop 7 display corners are delightfully curved. But the curve of the display corners doesn’t visually match the curve of the display lid corners, in part because the top bezel is bigger than those on the side because it contains the webcam and related sensors.

Not a problem, right? But compared that curve to the same corner on my MacBook Air. It’s perfect, matching a similar effect that Apple employs on newer iPhones and iPads. The bezels are also notably smaller, on all sides. (Yes, the Air has a notch.)

And the Air’s display lid is thinner than that of the Surface Laptop.

The second related issue isn’t unique to Microsoft: Big PC makers do this too, in part because Apple used to do it with previous generation MacBook Airs: While the PC looks thin (and thus seems relatively lightweight), especially from a distance, it’s just a mirage: Surface Laptop uses tapered bottom sides that mask it’s true thickness. That is, the base of the PC is smaller than the keyboard deck by about an inch on each side, and Surface Laptop is thicker toward the back than it is in the front. With the MacBook Air, it’s the same thinness all around, with no tapering. Apple has moved on, but Microsoft is still copying the old design.

There’s a reason for this: Surface Laptop, like other Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PCs, requires active cooling—fans, in other words—while the more efficient MacBook Air does not. And so the Air is thinner than Surface Laptop. A lot thinner: Where Surface Laptop is 0.72 inches thick, the MacBook Air is almost half as thick at just 0.45 inches. It’s obvious when you view them side-by-side, but it’s even more obvious when you pick them up: Where the Air is an impossibly light 3.3 pounds, Surface Laptop is 3.6 pounds. That doesn’t sound like much of a difference, I know. But it is: Surface Laptop has feels much heavier and denser than the Air. As with the thickness, it’s noticeable. In fact, it was the first thing I noticed when I lifted it out of its box.

The Surface Laptop setup experience was … interesting.

Most know that Microsoft delayed the Recall feature that would have debuted in preview form in the Surface Laptop and other Copilot+ PCs when they launched on Tuesday, June 18. But that wasn’t the original plan: In the week before that, Microsoft quietly scrambled to address security concerns in Recall before ultimately falling short, triggering the delay. We may never know exactly what happened in that week, but looking at how Microsoft customized the Windows 11 Setup Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) to address the changes it was forced to make, I’m curious how it was able to meet this last-minute deadline: There are some major changes.

Some of the changes were made ahead of time and are unrelated to Recall. Where the Windows 11 Setup OOBE typically displays as simple bitmaps with a vaguely Windows 11-esque color scheme, the Surface Laptop version has been updated to use an Acrylic or Mica-style translucent background through which you can see the new rainbow-colored Bloom wallpaper imagery. It’s similar to the original but nicer looking.

The Recall screen in the OOBE has been updated, as previously reported, and it’s now purely informational as this feature is not included in-box and is instead “coming soon.”

There was also a new screen in the restore from backup OOBE section: I always choose to “Set up as a new PC,” and it now warns you when you do so that “you won’t be able to restore from your backups later.” This is a confusing message, as you can, of course, restore from your backups at any time. It’s just that you can only do so during Windows Setup, so you’ll have to reset the PC to get this choice again. In other words, if you proceed past this step, you can’t restore the PC from a backup again while using Windows 11. You’ll have to reset it first. (This message seems unnecessarily alarmist to me, especially since Windows Backup does so little to begin with.)

At this point, the OOBE switches into a unique new phase I’ve never seen before, and this is what Microsoft must have really been working on in that week between announcing changes to Recall and then delaying it: It’s a new full-screen experience, post-OOBE, during which it installs … something. It takes a really long time, about 17 minutes, to complete this process. It starts off with a Windows update, during which time it rotates through a set of promotional screens with Copilot+ PC features like the Copilot key on the keyboard, Cocreator (in Paint), Image Creator in Photos, Windows Studio effects (sic), audio and video caption auto-translations, and Recall (“coming soon”). This process took 9 or 10 minutes, so I guess it’s just the Patch Tuesday cumulative update that brought Windows 11 24H2 to build 26100.863 (removing Recall).

And then Surface Laptop rebooted and installed the offline part of this “system update,” followed by what had to be a firmware update.

Were on-device SLMs (small language models) updated too? It’s unclear. But the offline part of this adventure took about 7 or 8 minutes. As noted, the entire wait was about 17 minutes, which is a tough thing to impose on customers who just bought an expensive new device.

I made a few quick observations about Surface Laptop while I waited on this process to conclude.

Overall, I like the PC quite a bit from a form factor perspective. Aside from the minor issues I noted up top, it’s a handsome, premium laptop. The black color wasn’t my first choice—wasn’t, in fact, a choice at all—but I like it.

There are three USB ports on the left side, a nice improvement from previous generation Surface Laptops. In this case, they are a full-sized USB-A 3.1 port (which is either 5 or 10 Gbps, I’ll find out) and two USB4 ports (40 Gbps, DisplayPort 1.4a, charging). There’s also a standard 3.5 mm headphone/microphone jack, something I missed over the past week with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14.

On the right, there’s a Surface Connect port for the oddly-retro 65-watt Surface charger and its magnetic blade connector (still difficult to seat correctly, I see) and a microSDXC card reader for some reason. It’s not clear “what” Surface Connect is anymore from a USB perspective, but it at least supports fast charging and it frees up the USB-C ports for other uses.

The display is interesting. I love that it’s 3:2 and that Microsoft stuck with this. And while I don’t care that the panel is multitouch or LCD/IPS (or, as Microsoft calls it, “PixelSense Flow”), I’m less excited by how glossy it is: During the offline parts of the initial setup described above, it was like looking in a mirror. I assume it’s fine in most indoor conditions, but reflections will be an issue. I’d rather this was just a matte, non-reflective display.

It does support 120 Hz, which is non-essential to me, but it also supports dynamic refresh rates, so I’ll leave that enabled, as it won’t hurt battery life. It also supports adaptive color (on by default, though it’s not harming the display quality like the Yoga did), HDR and Dolby Vision IQ, and is plenty bright with 600 nits for SDR and HDR content. Overall, mostly good.

I’ve always liked Surface keyboards, but it’s been a while, especially with Surface Laptop: I didn’t spend too much time using the keyboard until this morning—I’m writing this article on it, of course—and it seems great, with a snappy key feel, three levels of backlighting, and no superfluous or misplaced keys. It’s not silent or even quiet, but not particularly loud either. Kind of just right feel (and sound) overall.

The touchpad is delightfully medium-sized (and not stupidly large like that on the MacBook Air). It’s too early to say how reliable it is, but I’ve not once triggered a three-finger gesture mistakenly so far, and that’s usually not the case. If this holds up, it will be one of the better PC touchpads I’ve used.

The battery was at about 50 percent used when I first set up Surface Laptop last night—I looked at it but didn’t note the exact number for some reason—so I left it charging while we were out for dinner and then downloaded a few games from Steam last night. This morning, I continued setting it up, and it went into Energy Saver mode when the battery hit 20 percent. So I plugged it in again. It’s too early to have any thoughts on battery life, obviously, and all this initial setup work is non-representative anyway.

Anyone looking for a crapware-free Windows 11 experience should at least consider Surface: There’s a standalone Surface app that’s part utility and part adware for Microsoft Complete paid protections and peripheral up-sales, but other than that, it’s pretty clean, with superfluous Journal and Microsoft Whiteboard apps.

That said, it’s odd that Surface Laptop (or any Copilot+ PC) comes with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription promo, since Xbox Game Pass does not work with these PCs. Further odd: It’s only a 1-month off, where most PCs include a 3-month offer.

And there is, of course, enshittification all over Windows 11. This morning, Edge asked me to download the Microsoft Star app, whatever the F that is. And OneDrive naturally auto-enabled Folder Backup right after I said no to a pop-up banner notification to do so. That bad behavior has never changed.

And here’s a weird one: The Windows Subsystem for Android was preinstalled. Despite the fact that it’s been deprecated by Microsoft and will be removed from Windows 11 soon. It’s not clear what that’s all about.

I installed only a handful of apps before writing this article—iA Writer, Affinity Photo 2, Visual Studio Code, Grammarly, and Notion—but I’ll get it completely set up and configured today and then alternate between this and the Yoga Slim this coming week. So far, the performance has been terrific, and I’ve not heard a fan at all other than while briefly running the game Borderlands 3. As I write this, it’s completely silent.

Which is how I like it. More soon.