Microsoft announces new Surface lineup with Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips

Microsoft just announced its new line of Surface devices on Monday at a special “AI Era” press event at its Washington state headquarters. The new devices will come with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips, potentially making them a very attractive competitor to the latest Apple MacBooks and iPads.

We’ve seen two new devices so far: the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro. That’s right – no numbers have been added to the end of these two, as part of Microsoft’s rebranding under its ‘AI era’ of AI-powered Surface products.

The new Surface Laptop has impressive battery life thanks to the new Snapdragon X Elite processor, with up to 22 hours of local video playback and 15 hours of web browsing. Microsoft was also keen to show off Adobe Photoshop (and other Creative Cloud apps) running natively on the Arm-based processor at twice the speed of Apple’s competing M3 MacBook Air, along with new Prism emulation to bridge the gap between Windows on Arm and existing x64 and x86 software.

Meanwhile, the definitely not the Surface-Pro 11 is reportedly a whopping 90% faster than the 2022 Surface Pro 9 5G thanks to its new Snapdragon chip, and offers an impressive QHD front camera, along with a the back that can capture 4K video. Microsoft was also keen to tout the new accessibility-focused design features baked into the keyboard and trackpad.