Surface Pro 11 and Laptop 7 review: An Apple Silicon moment for Windows

Microsoft has been trying for so long to make Windows on Arm processors a thing that at some point I think I started to assume it would never happen.

The first effort was Windows RT, which managed to run reasonably well on the Arm hardware of the time, but it had a confusing new interface and couldn’t run any applications designed for traditional Intel- and AMD-based Windows PCs. Windows RT failed, in part, because a version of Windows that couldn’t run Windows applications and didn’t use a familiar Windows interface ignored two big reasons why people continued to use Windows.

Windows-on-Arm returned in the late 2010s, with improved performance and a translation layer for 32-bit Intel applications. This version of Windows, mostly limited to Surface hardware and a handful of barely promoted models from major PC makers, appeared quietly for years. It improved slowly and incrementally, as did the Qualcomm processors that powered those devices.

This brings us to Microsoft’s flagship Surface hardware this year: the Surface Laptop 7th Edition and Surface Pro 11th Edition.

These devices are Microsoft’s first flagship and consumer Surface devices to use Arm chips, while previous efforts were side projects or non-standard variants. The hardware and software have advanced enough that I can finally recommend a Windows-on-Arm device to many people without having to preface it with a bunch of exceptions.

Unfortunately, Microsoft chose to launch this impressive, capable Arm hardware and improved software alongside a suite of generative AI features, including the Recall screen recorder, a feature that became so unpopular so quickly that Microsoft was forced to delay it to address major security issues (and perception issues stemming from the security issues).

The other AI features are so superfluous that I’ll skip them in this review and cover them later when we take a closer look at the Windows 11 24H2 update. This is good enough hardware that I won’t need Windows on Arm continues to struggle, but the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, along with many other Arm-based Copilot+ PCs that have launched in the past couple of weeks, are much better than Arm PCs were a year or two ago.

Familiar outside

When Apple released the first two Apple Silicon Macs in late 2020, the one thing the company deliberately did not The change was in the exterior design. Apple didn’t comment much at the time, but the subliminal message was that these were just Macs, they looked like 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 mix of Arm and Intel/AMD, takes a similar approach: reworked on the inside, unremarkable on the outside. These models are very similar to the latest (and current) Intel-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models, and in the case of the Surface Pro, they actually look identical.

Both PCs still include some of the defining elements of the Surface hardware design. Both have displays with 3:2 aspect ratios that make them taller than most typical laptop displays, which still use 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratios. These displays also support touch input via fingers or the Surface Pen, and they still use slightly rounded corners (which Windows doesn’t formally acknowledge in software, so the corners of your windows will be cut off, though that’s never been an issue for me).