MacBook Air vs. Microsoft Surface Laptop: Specs and Features Comparison

Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop could be the most impressive laptop the company has ever made. It has a modern chassis with slim screen bezels and a new Arm-based CPU that could give Apple laptops a run for their money when it comes to performance. That’s no easy feat considering Apple’s impressive lead since 2020, but we won’t know how it stacks up until we have a Surface Laptop in our hands. That didn’t stop me from digging deeper into its specs to see how they stack up on paper.

Before we get to the heart of the matter, let’s take a look at some of the most obvious differences you’ll see between the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air M3 starts at $1,099 for an 8GB model, which already puts it at a disadvantage as it costs $100 more than the $999.99 Surface Laptop, which also gets 16GB of RAM from the start (more on that later). .

Both can get a lot more worn out, however. Spec the Surface and you can spend $2,499.99 for the pre-order-exclusive 15-inch 64GB RAM model with 1TB SSD and a Snapdragon X Elite. For the same price, you can get a 15-inch MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM and 2TB SSD.

At first glance and from certain angles, the Surface Laptop and MacBook Air look very similar. Both laptops are metal-clad and feature thin bezels, chick-style keys, and large tactile trackpads.

The Surface Laptop uses Windows Hello facial authentication, rather than a fingerprint sensor, to log in. The MacBook Air, despite having a dropped notch on the screen since 2022, doesn’t have Face ID and uses Touch ID fingerprint scanning, which works well, but yet.

The 13-inch MacBook Air has a higher native resolution (2560 x 1664) compared to the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop (2304 x 1536). Likewise, the 15-inch Surface Laptop has a 2,496 x 1,664 resolution versus the 15-inch Air’s 2,880 x 1,864 resolution. This means the MacBook Air can show a little more information on its 16:10 aspect ratio screen than the 3:2 aspect ratio Surface. But Microsoft’s laptop has a touchscreen, which no Mac has, and a 120Hz variable refresh rate, which only MacBook Pros can do.

The Surface also has more ports than the Air. Both companies’ laptops have 3.5mm headphone jacks and two USB 4 Type-C ports, but the Surface Laptop also has a USB-A port and the 15-inch has a microSDXC card reader. MagSafe helps the Air out a bit by freeing up a USB-C port while charging.

Microsoft says the Surface is its thinnest and lightest laptop ever, but it’s still a bit chunky. It weighs 2.96 pounds or 3.67 pounds and is 0.69 inches or 0.72 inches thick, depending on whether you buy the small or large. The MacBook Air, on the other hand, is 0.44 inches thick (or 0.45 for the 15-inch) and weighs 2.7 pounds or 3.3 pounds. Small differences, yes, but they are quite noticeable when you handle a laptop.

The crucial factor in Apple’s performance has been how much energy it actually uses to get there. Many Intel and AMD laptops have offered better raw performance, but no one has really touched Apple when it comes to power cost, at least so far.

The Surface and Air have similar battery capacities. Microsoft rates the Surface Laptop at a nominal 54Wh on the 13.8-inch model or 66Wh on the 15-inch model. Microsoft says this equates to 20 or 22 hours of video and 13 or 15 hours of web browsing, depending on whether you’re using the smaller or larger Surface. The MacBook Air is similar, with 52.6Wh for the 13-inch model or 66.5 in the 15-inch Air, good for 18 hours of video and 15 hours of web browsing, according to Apple.

But don’t count on these numbers. Both companies detail on their spec pages how they tested, but it’s not particularly useful for comparison without real-world testing. For example, Microsoft based on the number of 20 hours when playing a 1080p video on a Surface with 256GB of storage, 16GB of RAM, and a Snapdragon X Plus, with brightness set to 150 nits. Apple, on the other hand, I tested a MacBook Air M3, also using 1080p video, with brightness set to “8 clicks from bottom.” Depending on the panel it may be something like 150 nits, but there is no guarantee.

Microsoft’s laptop also has 16GB out of the box, while the MacBook Air has 8GB to start. You can argue about whether that’s enough for basic use and about the merits of Apple’s “unified memory” approach, but 16GB of RAM is still twice the working memory, and the Surface machine can be configured up to 32GB (or 64 GB on pre-orders), while Apple’s machine tops out at 24 GB. This means you can probably perform more memory-intensive tasks on a Surface Laptop before it starts to freeze.

But as far as pure performance goes, Microsoft wasn’t specific about how the Surface Laptop will perform with a 10-core Snapdragon X Plus or 12-core Elite chip. Qualcomm says these are all “performance” cores, rather than dividing work between them and “efficiency” cores, as Apple and others do. This means that Snapdragon X chips do not make it easier to work on cores that are not as performant but consume less energy. Still, the company also claims that they are more efficient than Apple chips. So we’ll have to wait and see how they compare in practice.

But Microsoft claimed at its Surface AI event on May 20 that so-called “Copilot Plus PCs” will be “58 percent faster” than a MacBook Air M3. The company didn’t specify whether these were Snapdragon X-equipped machines, but these are the first Copilot Plus PCs, so it’s possible.

Microsoft spent more time talking about AI capabilities because it clearly wants these machines to be used for AI tasks. The company claims that the Surface’s neural processing unit (NPU) can perform 45 trillion operations per second, or TOPS (that’s the number of mathematical equations it can solve per second). That’s more than double the 18 TOPS Apple claims for its Neural Engine chip in the M3. It’s even more than the M4 of the new iPad Pro, which, according to Apple, can reach 38 TOPS. This is impressive, although TOPS is a bit arbitrary as it doesn’t tell us much about the workload carried by the chip.

But all this talk about processors is just talk at the moment – ​​comparing specs and reading tea leaves. We still need to see these devices in action, outside of demonstrations, to get a real sense of their power. Fortunately, we don’t have to wonder much longer how the Surface Laptop and every other Snapdragon X-powered machine will perform. ready for pre-order and will be released on June 18, and others will come from companies such as Dell, Asus, Lenovo and Samsung.