New Microsoft Surface Laptop releases shown to match Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops for battery life
Roughly a month has passed since Microsoft updated the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with Intel Lunar Lake processors. One would be forgiven for missing the launch entirely, though.
As it stands, Microsoft does mention its new x86 machines at all on its home page. Instead, the Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7 (curr. $869 on Amazon) remain front and centre almost a year after their official release. Early review videos suggest that Microsoft's new Lunar Lake laptops rectify one of the main issues that affected recent x86-based Surface Laptops.
For example, YouTuber Andrew Marc David has demonstrated the Core Ultra 5 236V variant of the 'Surface Laptop 7th Intel series' surpassing its Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-80-100) sibling by over 4 hours in his video playback tests. Conversely, the latter outperforms the former by a slightly smaller margin in PCMark 10 Modern Office or equivalent tests.
The battery life results mentioned actually see the entry-level Surface Laptop 7th Intel lasting longer than Microsoft's official estimates. The Core Ultra 5 236V version tested is likely the most power efficient option though, considering that more powerful CPU options and 15-inch variants will likely draw more power. Nonetheless, we would expect good runtimes across the board, along with superior graphics performance compared to Snapdragon models thanks to Intel's Arc 130V and Arc 140V iGPUs.
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