Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 First impressions

Two weeks ago, Microsoft delivered the Surface Laptop 7 I pre-ordered to my location in Pennsylvania. I finally opened the box yesterday: We were in Mexico at the time and didn’t fly home until then, which made me wait to see if my expensive new purchase would live up to my expectations.

So far it is. But let me push some of the negatives as they were immediately apparent when I first opened the box.

At first glance, the Surface Laptop 7 is exactly what I expected, a premium take on Apple’s iconic MacBook Air that both compares and falls short of its inspiration. I’m reminded of Steve Jobs’ terrible quote about Microsoft having no class, delivered with a vengeance from his seat at the height of his career in the mid-1990s: The Surface Laptop looks and feels like a MacBook Air from afar, but the closer you look, the you see more of the lack of attention to detail that Microsoft is known for.

This won’t affect usage per se, but I suspect most wouldn’t even notice such things. But when you’re paying more than $2,100 for a laptop, it’s all about the details: You expect a premium experience. And this is where Microsoft has some work to do.

The most obvious example is the corners of the display. In keeping with the rounded corners of windows and controls in Windows 11, Microsoft and its PC manufacturing partners are selectively introducing similar curves to the corners of notebook display panels. This can be a nice look, although many early attempts are not particularly smooth, where the corners have a visually jagged appearance. In this case, the corners of the Surface Laptop 7 display are pleasantly curved. However, the curve of the display’s corners doesn’t visually match the curve of the display lid’s corners, partly because the top bezel is larger than the bezel on the side, as it houses the webcam and related sensors.

No problem, right? But I aligned that curve with the same corner on my MacBook Air. It’s perfect and matches the similar effect Apple uses on newer iPhones and iPads. The frames are also significantly smaller, on all sides. (Yes, Air has a notch.)

And the Air’s display lid is thinner than the Surface Laptop’s.

A second related problem is not unique to Microsoft: mainframe manufacturers do it, too, in part because Apple used do it with the previous generation MacBook Air: While the PC appearance thin (and therefore appears relatively light), especially from a distance, it’s just an illusion: the Surface Laptop uses tapered bottom sides that mask its actual thickness. That means the base of the computer is smaller than the keyboard board by about an inch on each side, and the Surface Laptop is thicker in the back than the front. With the MacBook Air, it’s the same thinness everywhere, without tapering. Apple has moved on, but Microsoft is still copying the old design.

There’s a reason for this: The Surface Laptop, like other Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ computers, requires active cooling — fans, in other words — while the more efficient MacBook Air does not. And so the Air is thinner than the Surface Laptop. AND lots of thinner: Where the Surface Laptop is 0.72 inches thick, the MacBook Air is almost half as thick at just 0.45 inches. It’s obvious when you look at them side by side, but it’s even more obvious when you pick them up: Where the Air is incredibly light at 3.3 pounds, the Surface Laptop weighs 3.6 pounds. Doesn’t sound like much of a difference, I know. But it is: The Surface Laptop feels much heavier and bulkier than the Air. As with the thickness, it is noticeable. Actually it was First thing i noticed when i took it out of the box.

Setting up the Surface Laptop was… interesting.

Most know that Microsoft has delayed the Recall feature that was supposed to debut in preview form on the Surface Laptop and other Copilot+ computers when they launched on Tuesday, June 18. But that wasn’t the original plan: In the week before that, Microsoft quietly coded to address security issues in the Recall app before it finally failed and triggered the delay. We may never know exactly what happened during that week, but looking at how Microsoft adapted the Windows 11 Setup Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) to deal with the changes it was forced to make, I wonder how he was able to accomplish this. this deadline at the last minute: There have been several major changes.

Some changes were made ahead of time and are not related to the Recall. Where Windows 11’s OOBE settings usually appear as simple bitmaps with a vague Windows 11 color scheme, the Surface Laptop version has been updated to use a translucent acrylic or mica-style background through which you can see the new rainbow-colored Bloom wallpaper. imagery. It is similar to the original but looks better.

The Recall screen in OOBE has been updated as previously announced and is now purely informational as the feature is not bundled and instead is “coming soon”.

There was also a new screen in the restore from OOBE backup section: I always choose “Set up as a new computer” and now it warns you when you do that “you won’t be able to restore from backups later.” This is a confusing message because you can of course always restore from your advances. It’s just that you can only do this during Windows installation, so you’ll have to reset your computer to get that option again. In other words, if you skip this step, you won’t be able to restore your computer from backup again while using Windows 11. You’ll need to reset it first. (This message seems unnecessarily alarming to me, especially since Windows Backup does so little to begin with.)

At this point, OOBE switches to a unique new phase that I’ve never seen before, and that’s what Microsoft must have really been working on that week between announcing the Recall changes and then postponing it: It’s a new full-screen experience. , post-OOBE, during which it installs … something. This process takes a really long time to complete, about 17 minutes. It starts with Windows Update, during which it goes through a set of promotional screens with Copilot+ PC features, such as the Copilot key on the keyboard, Cocreator (in Paint), Image Creator in Photos, Windows Studio effects (sic), sound. and automatic translations of video subtitles and Recall (“coming soon”). This process took 9 or 10 minutes, so I think it’s just the Patch Tuesday cumulative update that brought Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.863 (Remove Recall).

And then the Surface Laptop rebooted and installed the offline part of this “system update” followed by the firmware update.

Have the SLMs (small language models) been updated on the device as well? It’s unclear. But the offline part of this adventure took about 7 or 8 minutes. As mentioned, the entire wait was about 17 minutes, which is hard to force on customers who just bought an expensive new device.

I made a few quick observations about the Surface Laptop while I waited for this process to complete.

Overall, I quite like the PC from a form factor point of view. Aside from the minor issues I noted above, this is a nice, premium laptop. Black wasn’t my first choice – in fact it wasn’t a choice at all – but I like it.

There are three USB ports on the left side, which is a nice improvement over the previous generation of Surface Laptops. In this case, it’s a full USB-A 3.1 port (which is either 5 or 10 Gbps, I’ll find out) and two USB4 ports (40 Gbps, DisplayPort 1.4a, charging). There’s also a standard 3.5mm headphone/microphone jack, something I missed on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 last week.

On the right is the Surface Connect port for the oddly retro 65-watt Surface charger and its connector for the magnetic blade (still difficult to seat properly, I can see) and, for some reason, the microSDXC card reader. From a USB perspective, it’s no longer clear “what” Surface Connect is, but at least it supports fast charging and frees up USB-C ports for other uses.

The display is interesting. I love that it’s 3:2 and that Microsoft stuck with it. And while I don’t care if the panel is multitouch or LCD/IPS (or, as Microsoft calls it, “PixelSense Flow”), I’m not thrilled with how glossy it is: During the offline parts of the initial setup described above, it was like looking into mirrors. I suppose it’s fine in most indoor conditions, but reflections will be an issue. I’d prefer it to just be a matte, non-reflective display.

It supports 120Hz, which is immaterial to me, but it also supports dynamic refresh rates, so I’ll leave it on as it won’t hurt battery life. It also supports adaptive color (on by default, though it doesn’t hurt display quality like the Yoga), HDR and Dolby Vision IQ, and it’s bright enough at 600 nits for SDR and HDR content. Overall mostly good.

I’ve always liked Surface keyboards, but it’s been a while, especially with the Surface Laptop: I hadn’t spent much time with the keyboard until this morning – of course, it’s what I’m writing this article about – and it seems great, with nice touch keys, three levels backlight and no redundant or badly placed keys. It’s not silent or even quiet, but not particularly loud either. Overall just the right feel (and sound).

The touchpad is beautifully medium-sized (and not stupidly large like on the MacBook Air). It’s too early to say how reliable it is, but I haven’t triggered the three-finger gesture by mistake so far, and it’s not usually the case. If it holds up, it will be one of the better PC touchpads I’ve used.

When I first set up the Surface Laptop last night, the battery was about 50 percent dead — I looked it up, but I didn’t note the exact number for some reason — so I let it charge while we were at dinner, and then I downloaded a couple of games from steam last night. This morning I continued with the setup and went into power saving mode when the battery reached 20 percent. So I plugged it back in. Of course, it’s too early to have any thoughts on battery life, and all of these initial settings are unrepresentative anyway.

Anyone looking for a crapware-free Windows 11 experience should at least consider Surface: There’s a standalone Surface app that’s part utility and part adware for Microsoft Complete paid protections and peripheral up-sales, but other than that it’s pretty clean, with an unnecessary log . and Microsoft Whiteboard applications.

That said, it’s odd that the Surface Laptop (or any Copilot+ computer) comes with the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription promotion, since Xbox Game Pass doesn’t work with those computers. Another oddity: It’s only 1 month off where most computers include a 3 month offer.

And of course there is enshittification in all Windows 11. This morning Edge asked me to download the Microsoft Star app, whatever the F is. And OneDrive naturally automatically enabled folder backup right after I said no to the pop-up banner warning to do so. This bad behavior never changed.

And here’s an odd one: A Windows subsystem for Android was preinstalled. Despite the fact that it was deprecated by Microsoft and will soon be removed from Windows 11. It is not clear what it is.

Before writing this article I only installed a few apps – iA Writer, Affinity Photo 2, Visual Studio Code, Grammarly and Notion – but I’m going to get it fully set up and configured today and then I’ll be alternating between this and Yoga Slim this for the coming week. So far the performance has been amazing and I haven’t heard a single fan apart from a short game launch Borderlands 3. It’s completely silent as I write this.

Which I like. More soon.