Should Microsoft be looking a little closer to home?
Microsoft has unveiled new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices that it says can directly compete with – and outperform – Apple’s MacBook Air. Yet while their performance is truly impressive, there’s a notable caveat that suggests the MacBook Air comparison isn’t quite on the money.
Yesterday, Microsoft put on a special show for its new laptops, which come equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips based on the Arm architecture. This is the same architecture that Apple’s latest M3 chips are built on, and it is known for its ability to combine blistering performance with ice-cold efficiency.
In tests seen by The Verge, Microsoft’s laptops – dubbed Copilot+ PCs – beat the M3 MacBook Air in a series of benchmarking trials measuring chip performance. In terms of battery life, too, Microsoft apparently came out on top, managing just under 17 hours in a web browsing test and over 20 hours of video playback.
