Alright, there's been a lot of hype around the new Surface Pro 11 laptops for two major reasons: it's   one of the first to get the Snapdragon X Elite chip, a new ARM-based processor that's apparently much  faster than the MacBook Air's M3, and it's technically  the world's first CoPilot+ PC, which is Microsoft's   marketing catchphrase for the new AI features.

So  let's debunk all of that hype because I've got a  new unit right here, and I thought, you know, hey,  let's replace my MacBook Air M3 for a week and   instead let's take the Surface Pro 11 with the  flex keyboard right here, and then let's just see  what it's all about.

So starting now, and over the  next 7 days, I'm going to test as much as I can   from its portability, Microsoft's new Copilot  AI features, its battery life, and maybe the most  interesting, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip,  which Microsoft is claiming is 58% faster than   my MacBook Air M3.

So today's video isn't sponsored  by Microsoft or any brand at all, but if you'd like   to support this channel, drop this video a like, and  if you're interested in the wallpapers, here I'll  drop a link to the wallpaper bundle below.

First things first, let's unbox it   together.

So right out of the box, the sapphire blue  color is extra nice. It's a lighter tone than the   midnight MacBook Air and has a lot more sheen.

Inside the box, it's  pretty simple; I think there's just the charger,   and this is Microsoft's proprietary charger design,  specifically for Surface devices.

But thankfully,  you can also use the USB-C ports to charge all   right.

So the screen feels great, and it's super glossy,  which makes sense since this is an OLED display. So  yeah, in hand, it feels great, looks great, really sturdy   build.

So far, so good. Let's move on to the new flex   keyboard.

So there are a few new things here, and  opening it up, you have the keyboard itself, which  is going to be a big part of the Surface Pro 11,  and also the new Surface Slim Pen here. It looks   Great, but in hand it kind of feels flimsy and hollow, to be honest, especially if I'm comparing it to the Apple Pencil.

But I'll have to put this pen to the test.

All right, so the keyboard itself feels light. The trackpad now has haptic feedback, and the key travel is decent. Then snapping it on the kickstand at the back also feels quite solid.

Yeah, so far, my overall impression is that the build quality is really solid yet portable, maybe even more so than the MacBook Air. So let's take a quick side-by-side look.

And yeah, right away, you can tell that it's even smaller and slightly lighter than the MacBook Air. It's going to be really interesting replacing the M3 MacBook Air for the Surface Pro 11 this week.

The last time I used a Microsoft Surface was back when I used the Surface Pro fifth generation in 2017 for work. So using the new Surface Pro 11 almost a decade later is going to be really interesting.

All right, so before I report back a week later, the setup was interesting. It ran out of battery midway through this setup, but I can tell right away that this OLED screen is going to be incredible.

The blacks are so much better on the Surface Pro. And by the way, I experienced probably the most challenging and frustrating capture puzzle. It took me a solid two minutes, and I failed this one twice.

Has anyone seen this one before? It's such a pain in the ass. But um, anyway, everything else was a breeze, and so the magic of video editing will fast forward a week. I'll give you my honest thoughts on the Surface Pro 11 replacing my MacBook Air.

Let's go. Okay, so it's been a little bit over a week, and I'll tell you right away that the Surface Pro is a winning package. Microsoft has done a lot right, and I'm surprised how much I'm enjoying using this device the entire week.

So much so that I think it's an exciting new era for Microsoft devices. But, and there's always a but, let's start with the questionable Co-Pilot AI Plus features.

Because as soon as I started testing it on the first day, I quickly realized this isn't exactly what I was expecting. And here's what I mean.

So, the very first day with it, I jumped into exploring the Co-Pilot Plus AI features that are powered by the onboard Neural Processing Unit, or MPU. There are a few things we can do with Co-Pilot.

Plus, so what I'll do is run through them and give you my opinion on each feature. So this new button here will launch Co-Pilot. It's basically Microsoft's AI chatbot in the form of a local app.

And it's by far the Co-Pilot Plus feature that I use the most. This week, I used it for quick questions or to generate some code. It's not unique, though; you'd probably get similar results just using Perplexity, Gemini, or GPT. Then there's Co-Creator, which is kind of like Microsoft Paint on AI steroids.

When I scribble on Paint with this Surface Slim Pen, Co-Creator generates a live AI image of what it believes I'm drawing. It's a bit finicky, and sometimes it just doesn't understand what I'm drawing at all. But when it does get it right, it works well, and I could see myself using it if I was offline, on a plane flight for example, and I needed the help of generative AI.

That's probably where I'd use Co-Creator. So far, you can probably see it's not groundbreaking stuff, but there are a few more features in the Co-Pilot Plus ecosystem you should probably know about. Windows Studio Effects helps improve lighting and audio on phone calls. It's nice to have, but the built-in 1440p webcam already does a decent job without AI help anyway.

Something more useful is live captions. This feature translates 44 languages into English in real time. I use the feature with YouTube videos, even live video calls, and I ran a quick test on English-dubbed anime just to see how accurate it is translating dramatic Japanese words into English. As you can see here, it's actually pretty accurate, but there is a bit of a 1 to 2 second delay for the translation to come through.

Then maybe most controversially is the Recall AI feature that I think Microsoft ironically recalled, so I wasn't able to test it for myself. So on paper, it's actually kind of cool. If I want to find a document or a file where I've forgotten the file name, I can just describe the file in the search, and the Recall feature will retrieve it.

It works by taking daily data from applications and screenshots and then stores these locally and analyzes it so we can recall it.

them with natural language, but right away you can see where the controversy started. There are a lot of potential privacy concerns with this feature. Thankfully, there is an option to toggle off the feature and delete any data that has been collected. But yeah, as of today, that's about the extent of the Co-Pilot Plus AI features, and to be honest, after the first day of testing and playing around with Co-Pilot Plus, I didn't use it as much as I thought I would. It's nice to have a dedicated button that brings up a local AI chatbot, but if you're thinking of buying a Surface Pro for the AI features, you'll probably be disappointed because frankly, it's overhyped.

and sort of half-baked, at least until Microsoft continues to improve and add new features. But aside from half-baked AI features, as I continued to use the Surface Pro on the second and third day, this is when I really began to enjoy the device because this device is snappy and plenty powerful—like surprisingly more so than my MacBook Air M3 configuration, which also has the same 16 GB of memory.

So I had to run some benchmarks right away to compare the devices because the Surface Pro was just cutting through my workflow with so much ease, and I was surprised at what I was seeing. The Surface Pro with the X Elite processor scored 13,097 on the Geekbench 6 multicore test.

That's ridiculous! It's one of the highest scores I've seen in a 2-in-1 device. I ran the same test on the MacBook Air M3, and it scored 11,450, so that's a 13% performance bump on the Surface Pro—not bad at all. The M3 Air did wipe the floor with the Surface Pro 11 on the single-core test, though.

And to this day, single-core is still the more important score for like 99% of average users. I also used the HandBrake app to convert a 2 GB 4K video clip down to 1080p, and the Surface Pro...

managed to get it done in just about under a minute while the M3 managed to get it done in a minute and 10 seconds, so again, substantially faster. Right now, not everything runs natively.

on ARM unfortunately. For example, Adobe only offers Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat natively, so Adobe Premiere Pro has to run on emulation for now, which means slower performance. Also, gaming is a letdown because most games aren't compatible on ARM devices and if they are compatible, typically they don't run well since it's not optimized for the ARM architecture. To be fair though, the Snapdragon X processor isn't made for dedicated gaming, so that's one of my biggest gripes with the Surface Pro 11.

Many apps currently run on emulation and it either underperforms, drains the battery, or just straight up doesn't work.

Running HandBrake absolutely demolishes the battery life on the Surface Pro 11. So let's talk about the battery life because outside of using HandBrake, the battery life is actually a selling point and gets a gold star.

I got anywhere from 12 to 14 hours of battery life each day, so plenty enough for mixed day usage, and that's a big improvement over the previous gen Surface Pros.

Compared to my M3 MacBook Air, though, it's just an hour or two off in battery life because my M3 Air gets 15 to 16 hours of battery life. But I mean, for an ARM laptop in this super portable form factor, lasting the entire day is pretty incredible.

Moving on to the design in 2-in-1 form factor, it's awesome. When I was taking this out to work, it's super versatile and portable, even more than the already portable MacBook Air.

So by itself, it's a great tablet with an awesome 13-inch OLED touchscreen display. I've used it by itself with the Surface Slim Pen outside and it's a great combo to jot down notes or make edits in Photoshop and then just slip it back into a bag.

It's ultra thin, only weighs 950 grams or about 2 lbs, so it's almost a full pound lighter than my M3 MacBook Air.

And like I said, that's already quite light and portable, so the Surface Pro is an absolute dream to get around with. The only thing is, good luck using this on your lap.

Um, it doesn't sit flush on your lap at all unlike traditional laptops. But when I was back working at a desk, though, the Surface Pro Flex keyboard is one of the better tablet keyboards that I've used.

It's got a slot to house the Slim Pen and snapping it onto the display and opening up the kickstand. It works just as well as a laptop as it does as a tablet. So, the past week, I really liked using it.

This is using the display further away from me and then with the Flex Keyboard closer to me, sort of like a traditional keyboard and monitor setup. It's a really comfortable and flexible desk setup.

The keys are also backlit and decent to type on. The touchpad is now a bit larger and surprisingly responsive. By the way, it was easy enough to multitask and flick through apps, and I only had to charge it once this entire week.

So, I think the Flex Keyboard gets about 40 hours of battery life. That's really solid. Is it a better keyboard than the MacBook Air keyboard? Definitely not, but it is a damn good 2-in-1 detachable keyboard, and I didn't have an issue typing on it all day.

There's even a 10-megapixel rear camera if you want to snap photos on it. I took a couple of snaps just to test it out, but it wasn't anything special.

I didn't find the need to snap photos on the Surface Pro while I was using it the entire week. The only real fault with this design is probably the really limited ports; it only has two USB-C ports, and that's it.

So, a dock is a must for a full work-from-home desktop setup, but it's the same situation anyway with the M3 MacBook Air. I can't believe that I haven't even talked about the new OLED display yet because, frankly, it's incredibly good.

It's a 13-inch 120Hz display with HDR and Dolby Vision IQ, and I have to say it puts up a fight against the MacBook Air. I've watched plenty of YouTube content and a little bit of Netflix one night with this device, and I'm really impressed with its ultra-deep blacks, detail, and brightness.

It's also just a pleasure to use for daily work. The M3 MacBook Air is no slouch with its Liquid Retina display.

Display, but it's no OLED panel either. You can't go wrong with either display ultimately, but using the Surface Pro display for a week now, I have to say I'd probably pick the Surface Pro display all the same.

Right, so after a full week with the Surface Pro replacing my M3 MacBook Air, here are my final thoughts. I'm disappointed that Co-Pilot Plus is a letdown; I didn't find myself using it after the first day, and that's not going to change anytime soon. It's currently more marketing than substance, but the Surface Pro is more than its overhyped AI features. It's an incredible portable computer.

With the best battery life I've seen in a 2-in-1 form factor, performance is even snappier than most desktop PCs out there, and the OLED display is, I think, better than my M3 Air's display. If I were on the road all the time and traveling for work, I would pick up the Surface Pro 11 over the MacBook Air, no questions asked. But with the disappointing Co-Pilot Plus features and a lot of my key work apps not supported by ARM just yet, I'll have to switch back to my M3 MacBook Air for now.

I can't wait to see how the Surface Pro 11 improves as developers build out support and Co-Pilot Plus evolves. For now, by itself, the Surface Pro 11 is absolutely the best Surface by a long shot, and I feel like it's a fresh and exciting start of a new era of Microsoft laptops.

If you made it to the end of this video, comment the code word Co-Pilot. I'll give it a like for watching until the end. I'll drop my review of the M3 MacBook Air over here; it's an incredible laptop still.

And as always, thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. [Music]

A Week with Surface Pro 11 OLED – Replacing my MacBook Air

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A Week with Surface Pro 11 OLED – Replacing my MacBook Air

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