There is now a worthy competitor to the MacBook Air.

The product is simply called Surface Laptop (dropping the numbering convention of its predecessor and replacing the business-focused Surface Laptop 6 launched earlier this year) in marketing materials and press releases; however, Microsoft's website lists it as "Surface Laptop ^7th Edition".

The new Surface Laptop offers two screen size options: 13.8 inches or 15 inches.

Regardless of its name, the new Surface Laptop is available in 13.8-inch and 15-inch sizes. Outwardly, it closely resembles the MacBook Air with its large trackpad, aluminum casing, and ultra-thin, fanless design. It also comes with a minimum of 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, with variants offering up to 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The 64GB model is only available for pre-order.

The most notable feature of this Surface Laptop is the Snapdragon X chip, which delivers up to 80% faster performance than previous Surface Laptop models, partly due to thermal throttling, and can provide up to 22 hours of local video playback. Customers can choose between the Snapdragon X Plus or X Elite chip, depending on the performance they need.

Snapdragon X offers several AI (artificial intelligence) advantages, allowing Microsoft to call the new Surface Laptop an AI PC, bringing several new Copilot+ PC features such as the Recall tool which can retrieve everything a user has done on their PC.

The new Surface Laptop looks quite similar to the MacBook Air in many ways.

If all goes well, this is seen as a turning point for Microsoft, Windows, and PCs in general. The Snapdragon X processor avoids the typical x86 architecture and instead uses ARM, an architecture usually reserved for smartphones. Creating an ARM chip that can compete with Intel or AMD CPUs is an extremely difficult task, but in return, it offers the advantage of energy efficiency, allowing Surface Laptops or MacBook Airs to deliver all-day battery life in a compact, fanless design.

Furthermore, this also allows Microsoft to reduce its dependence on Intel as the x86 world becomes stagnant with only minor performance improvements on top-tier CPUs. ARM's development is far more open than x86 and has accelerated in recent years. Even if x86 remains the standard for Windows desktops, Microsoft's use of Snapdragon X will put pressure on Intel.

The new Surface Laptop starts at $1,000, with pre-orders now open and availability on June 18th.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/da-co-doi-thu-xung-tam-voi-macbook-air-185240523140551217.htm