Surface Laptop 7 vs MacBook Air M3: Reality Check

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Can the CoPilot+ Surface Laptop really beat the M3 MacBook Air?
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I tested the new CoPilot Plus Surface Laptop 7 against the M3 MacBook Air. Microsoft claims the CoPilot Plus is up to 58% faster in sustained workloads and has 20% better battery life. My experience with both shows gains but also trade-offs. I’ll dig into a real-world comparison, examining performance, battery life, and usability. Curious if one outperforms the other? Stick around to find out how the Snapdragon X Elite stacks up in everyday use vs the M3, and which offers better value.

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00:00 | Start
01:31 | Design
02:57 | Ports
03:32 | Displays
05:35 | Performance & Battery
10:54 | Other Stuff
11:53 | Wrapping Up

#techreview #macbookair #surfacelaptop
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I would like to find just one reviewer who runs these tests on the boring stuff that most people do most of the time. We are not all content creators. How about running a mix of Office applications such as importing and manipulating large data sets in Excel, and say browsing and keeping 20 tabs open, and see how long the two last against each other? Everybreviewer want to show us Lightroom and Games, and I don’t do either. I’d just like a windows machine that performs well vs an Air in these mundane daily work tasks.

richardbeaumont
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My Surface Laptop 7 with SD X Plus/512GB arrived the other day. Man it's good. As smooth as the M1 Air (haven't used M2/M3). Seems to me unless you Game or Video Edit (Adobe apps coming soon, DaVinci Resolve is in Beta) or use Google Drive these are now for everyone. Significant improvement over any Intel laptop I've used.

bradavon
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Been running the Lenovo Slim 7x for 5 days now, no regrets. It's a pleasure, gorgeous HDR OLED screen, lightweight and no fan noise with minimal heat. Basically checks all the boxes I care about.

Supports all my dev workload applications (.NET/Node/Python/Docker).

For gaming I just use Moonlight, I've owned 7 ultrabooks, 0 of them for gaming. Never made sense to try to game on an ultrabook because you then make sacrifices to height, weight and battery life, then what's the point.

I've probably got 4-5 applications that are non native, but all run fine under emulation.

Just fyi Qualcomm just released new beta GPU drivers that improves speed and compatibility for games and video rendering and general performance.

TalynOne
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Transitioned from a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro to a Macbook Pro 16” M1 Max last month, and holy smokes the difference is night and day - I don’t game so the M1 Max is perfect for me. Battery life is 1000% better and so is fan nose (absolutely nonexistent on the Mac). Only thing is it took me a couple weeks to get used to the Mac quirks but once I did, I can say I was very happy with my purchase

marcoraydiaz
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This is probably the most balanced and impartial review that I've seen comparing these 2. In this Gen-AI era, I'd love to see a comparison of Ollama running on both machines, using the same models and prompts, for example: llama3:7b with a prompt about summarizing a text, and listing the main takeaways from the text. It could be done using: ollama run llama3:7b --verbose. On the photo editing side of things, I use ON1 Photo Raw and I've contacted them about an Arm optimized version for Windows - in short: it's not in their plans at the moment.

zecastevenson
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First time watching a video of yours. Nice video! Watched it from start to finish, very clear and enjoyable to watch.

ErykDante
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I have been a Macbook user for some time... From time to time i have tried different Windows laptops but always ended returning those... However this time things seems to be different. Finally Windows laptop which is fast, silent, great build quality, beatiful screen (Windows hello + no notch).. So actually just sold my M3 Air and i'm going to keep Surface Laptop. All the critical apps that i'm using are ARM native (Unity (beta), Visual Studio, Office, Affinity, Spotify, Slack etc.. ). Only little disapointment is GPU performance BUT this is not for gaming anyway... Good job Microsoft.

mikko.kartano
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Your comment about battery is misleading. Apple purposely shows little battery drain at the beginning (ex: the 1% battery drain from 100% to 99%) but drains battery much faster later on to give the illusion of a better battery life. The surface shows a more equal battery drain, which is why you may think it performs worse on battery. In order to test these both equally, you must drain them to 0%.

miluv.
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I dont get it if surface can fit a 1080p web cam without a notch in that similar sized bezel, why cant apple do the same?

ios
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I'd love to buy a Surface Lpatop or so many reasons. The touchscreen, the move to ARM, the 3:2 aspect ratio with a 120hz refresh rate, WiFi 7, etc. However, i cannot trust Microsoft to truly support the transition to ARM, nor do I trust them to make an experience that iis as cohesive as Apple's offering.

mathloverk
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I had a couple of Surface products back when they first released and was impressed with their build quality. I've transitioned to the Apple ecosystem since then but if I hadn't the new Surface laptop would be a compelling option. Once they work the bugs out. Thanks for the honest comparison.

bryans
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I just bought a M3 MBA 15" and it's my first Mac, I would've loved to have waited to get a X-Elite surface laptop but I'm not keen on the early adoption problems that come with first generation devices, and for the same price I could have gotten a 16GB/512GB X-Elite, instead of my 8GB/512GB MBA which I wouldn't mind... that and the amount of paid software you need to have a good experience on Macs is insane, I still might get a X-Elite Surface just for something to play with sometimes, although its GPU performance gives me second thoughts, not that I do GPU intensive tasks but it's unusual for them to match and exceed apple silicon but be so far behind in the GPU, I've not doubt the next iteration will be better, but with apples event coming up and the M4 coming to the MBP and maybe even M4 PRO/MAX/ULTRA I think the X-Elites extra performance in multi-score is about to be taken, I get a feeling snapdragon will always be behind Apple.

MorganJoe
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It's crazy; I sometimes forget I'm not watching a multi-million sub tech channel when watching this one. There are only a few channels whose videos I watch immediately, LTT, Snazzy Labs, Marques of course, Dave Lee, Jarrod's Tech, Matt Moniz, Mrwhosetheboss, Max Tech, Just Josh (another smallish but growing channel), and this one (I also think Mark Linsangan, whose channel is also small, is outstanding). That really says something about the quality of videos you produce, KE. Keep up the great work man. I'll be with you as your channel grows and grows. I just hope you're not pulled out of youtube for some high paying creative job somewhere. I know you will have that option...it's just that selfishly I hope you stay or at least keep producing content here. Have a great night man.

FoxxFire
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Appreciate your real world insights into ARM performance within the Microsoft world. As someone who is a business user of web applications, email, and Office apps, it seems that both Apple and MS platforms are more than adequate to the tasks at hand. Most of computational "heft" that I require lies in cloud based applications delivered through the browser. Thus, I am inclined to focus on keyboard, screen, and overall build quality as criteria for a replacement to my travel notebook (Surface Pro 6), Do you agree or am I missing something?

LouisKokernak
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the ARM subsystem on windows needs serious work.. the emulator needs to be more efficent

Kevynmorgan
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Thanks Kyle, this is nice. I think it would also be interesting to see performance differences of windows 11 running virtually on Mac M3 Air vs Windows running natively on Surface.

rajsudhakaran
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Good video. Blender & DiVinci runs like crap on these ARM based Microsoft laptops. They'll need some firmware and software updates to fix those issues. At the end of the day, it appears that in single core test the Surface loses, and in multi core test the Surface wins. The future looks good for these ARM based laptops.

williamcopeland
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Great review from a quality perspective. As far as technical content is concerned, I don't think it is fair to compare video rendering, 3D capability, etc. Snapdragon is simply not for that (this year). The same applies to emulated comparisons (however that was more unbiased). Thank you! :)

EdinaLantos
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All I need is Linux with working HW acceleration on the new chip.

henz
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I just don't think Widows running ARM will be very popular until they support descrete GPUs and game developers start making AAA game titles for it. Gaming is what really has pushed the PC advances in the last 20 years or so. Most Windows users aren't going to want to buy an expensive Windows laptop that has terrible GPU performance.

lenn