Microsoft's new Surface Laptop 13 is a very good everyday laptop

Microsoft has updated its compact Surface Laptop 13 for 2026. In our review, the 13-inch laptop proves to be a very good everyday device with no major weaknesses. Compared with last year's model, it now uses a more efficient Snapdragon X2 Plus processor, which particularly impresses with its strong single-core performance, matching Intel's Panther Lake processors in this respect. There is more than enough performance for everyday tasks. Only gaming performance is severely limited, so streaming services such as Xbox Cloud Gaming or Nvidia's GeForce Now are the better option here.

The second upgrade concerns the IPS touchscreen, which is even brighter and now exceeds 500 nits. Thanks to its low black level, perceived image quality is very good. Color reproduction in the sRGB color space is also extremely accurate, making the display well suited to image editing. However, there are also two weaknesses: The screen is highly reflective, and its refresh rate is still just 60 Hz. This is somewhat disappointing, given that the new Surface Pro 12 convertible, for example, received a 90 Hz screen this year.

Other advantages of the Surface Laptop 13 include its comfortable input devices and long battery life of nearly 19 hours in our Wi-Fi test. Although a small fan is installed, getting it to kick in during everyday use is not that easy. The laptop remains completely silent during normal tasks. Even when gaming or running the processor at full load, only a very quiet whooshing sound below 30 dB(A) can be heard after a few minutes.

While other manufacturers are increasingly offering laptops with 8 GB of RAM to keep prices down, Microsoft has decided to equip the new model with at least 16 GB of RAM. This makes the laptop considerably more future-proof, but it also raises the starting price to at least €1,319 with a 256 GB SSD. We would still recommend to wait a bit as Surface devices usually get discounts pretty quickly. For more information on the Surface Laptop 13 2026, including benchmarks, see our in-depth review.