now yesterday, I released my first look review on the brand new Surface Pro 11 with its OLED display, a host of other changes, and the big change of course being the processor, the Snapdragon X Elite under the hood. Everything looks very promising, although it is early days as I mentioned, but a lot of potential there. If you didn't see that video, check out the link in the description below. Well, I have its sibling here today. We unboxed it in that mega unboxing that we did a couple of days ago. If you didn't see that, I'll leave a link to the replay in the description below, but we have a number of big changes here. Not only does this also get the Snapdragon X Elite under the hood powering things, but we also get an improved display. One of the things that I've been criticizing the Surface Laptop line over the last few years is its rather dated look. It had pretty large bezels, and it just didn't look right, a little lackluster in terms of the display. Well, that all changes here with

this Surface Laptop 7. We get thinner bezels. We get a really bright display with peak brightness of 600 nits. We also get a gorgeous color here, the same color we saw on the Surface Pro 11, and that of course is the sapphire, which is absolutely stunning. You could also get it in other really interesting colors, but we don't have the Alcantara on this one. Remember we used to have it on the keyboard deck, and it is gone. It's all metal. It's a very premium device with very high-end features, and one of the things we're seeing here is extremely amazing battery life. Yes, we're not playing around here, and I'm going to give you a spoiler here. I'm seeing 20 plus hours of battery, so yes, this thing is pretty phenomenal. We're seeing very good single multi-core performance out of that Snapdragon X Elite. It's running cool and quiet for the most part, although if you do push it, it will bring in the fan noise and it will warm up a little bit.

nothing overly concerning there, but I think the overall takeaways. This is a pretty stunning looking device with an improved display. Now, I would have liked to have seen OLED on this one like we did on the Surface Pro 11, but it is still a good display nonetheless. Hey, everybody, it's Andrew, and this is my review of the Surface Laptop 7 running the brand new Snapdragon X Elite processor, all new for 2024. Coming up. Now, before we get to the unit itself, I just want to let everyone know. In the interest of transparency and full disclosure, I'm not being paid by Microsoft. I'm not being sponsored by Microsoft. All the opinions you're about to hear are my own. Microsoft is not getting copy approval. That means they're seeing this video for the first time just like you. Now, this unit was purchased with my own money. This is not a review unit from Microsoft. Now, the starting price for the Surface Laptop 7 is $999.99 over at microsoft.com. But of course, if you are a

student or in the military, you do get a discount. $8.99 starting price. I picked mine up over at Best Buy, and I paid $1,399. I went with the 13.8 in device with the Snapdragon X Elite. That one comes in at $399.99 and comes in different colors. I picked it up in Sapphire. You could also get it in a 15-in variant for more screen real estate for those that want it, of course, that'll be a little bit heavy here, but that looks like an intriguing choice as well for those interested. I will leave a link in the description below for more information and where you can buy one. And as a side note, I already did my unboxing and first look review of the Surface Pro 11 also in this gorgeous Sapphire color. For those that didn't see that, I will drop a link in the description below if you want to check that out. And with the specs and pricing out of the way, let's find out what you get inside the

Box. Okay, so very nice packaging, by the way. That opened up pretty nice. And so, what do we have here? We have the unit itself in that sapphire blue. It's a sapphire color, whatever. It's yeah, it's really nice, actually. Let's see what else we get here. So, we get their power charger. You can see that here. This is going to be 39 watts. And you can see it there. And it uses the Surface Connect. So, I'm glad they still have that. You could charge via the USB type-C, but has Surface Connect. And then, of course, of course, you have your plug that comes with that. And you get some documentation. I'm assuming in here. I don't think it's anything important. That's a Surface Laptop 7 in Sapphire. Beautiful if you can see it there among the other laptops. Very, very nice. Very nice. It's a little bit of heft on it. Let's get a measurement of the weight. So, in kilograms, of course, 1.343 kg. And that is 2 lb 15.4 oz. So, a shade under 3 lb. Okay, not

too bad the build is amazing on this, with the power cord and the power charger 1.54 n kg and that is 3 lb 6.7 Oz. Okay, let's check out the port selection. On the left side is a 3.5 mm microphone headphone combo Jack, a USB type a port, and two USB-C 4.0 ports that are full function supporting data charge and and display out. Moving over to the right side is your surface connect port and that's it. There's no micro SD card reader. One thing to note, you do get a Micro SD card reader if you go with the 15-in version. Now when it comes to the memory options, here you can go with either 16 or 32 GB of LP DDR5X RAM, and there is removable Solid State Storage Gen 4 SSD. According to their specs, 256 gigs, 512 gigs, or 1 TB options. Now I haven't opened up my laptop yet to try to get to that removable storage.

will hopefully do that by the full review so stay tuned. That will be coming very soon. Now, one of the big changes we're seeing here is a bigger display, 13.8 in, and you'll also notice something very welcome here, smaller bezels. Amen, something I've been harping on for the last few generations of the Surface laptops. I wanted to see thinner bezels. It was looking rather dated in the last few generations, so I'm glad to see they thinned out the bezels, giving it a more sleek and modern look. Now, one thing I wish they did was put an OLED display here, at least as an option, like they did on the brand new Surface Pro 11, which is absolutely gorgeous. For those that didn't see that video, link for that will be in the description below. Now, having said that, this IPS display is certainly excellent. It has some really deep blacks, some really vibrant colors, and everything just seems to pop, so it looks good. The contrast is great, so I have no real complaints on that, other than when

you look at it side to side with the Surface Pro 11 with its OLED display, you'll notice the difference, but on its own, it's an excellent panel. Now, as I mentioned in my prior video on the Surface Pro 11, I couldn't get my Colorimeter, the spider 5 Elite, to work because the drivers are just not working, so I couldn't get the actual metrics of this display. But from the eyeball test, everything looks really good. It supports HDR according to the settings here, so watching high dynamic range content has been good so far in the 48 hours that I've been using this. It also is a touch display, even though it is a clamshell design. Having the ability to do pinch to zoom and scroll with your finger and stuff like that has been actually really good. Now, it doesn't have pen support, so it doesn't support the Slim Pen 2 that we saw on the Surface Pro 11. For those wondering, I did try it, but having the ability to use touch is a nice convenience factor.

certainly something you don't get on a Macbook, so that is, uh, something that differentiates this from the MacBook line. And it's a very bright display. Now, watching standard dynamic range, Microsoft's claiming 400 nits the brightness and peaking as high 600 nits in terms of HDR content. So overall, that has not been an issue. Now, it is a glossy display, but not overly glossy. But depending on your lighting conditions, you will notice that glare and reflection. So just keep that in mind. So what do you think about this camera on the Surface Laptop 7? Brand new here for 2024 running the brand new Snapdragon X Elite processor. It's a 1080p camera. What do you think about it in terms of the video audio? And of course, it is an IR camera that allows you to log in with face recognition with Windows Hello. And it also has the studio effects or the AI effects. It has an MPU, of course. That's I think up to 45 tops according to Qualcomm and Microsoft anyway. So this is

the auto framing. So, you can go into if I go out of frame. There it goes. It will keep it keep you always in frame does a reasonably good job. Now, here's something a little bit different. Here's the portrait light, whatever that does. Okay, I don't know. Uh, it also the eye contact background effect standard blur portrait blur. And then here's something that I didn't see also is a creative filter. You got this is Illustrated, this is watercolor, and this is animated. I don't know about any of these. Uh, yeah, this is the Illustrated. I'm not really sure these are the creative filters. Something a little bit different. Uh, let me know what you think in the comment section below. And I'm absolutely loving the keyboard so far. The tactility, the feedback, and the overall key travel has been excellent. I'm a big fan of the surface keyboards in the past, and this is no exception. It just feels something really good to the touch here. I really like it, and it has a nice backlight on it, so no complaints there. And I got to

tell you, it's just been a pleasure to type on over the last 48 hours or so that I've been using it, and I absolutely love the touchpad. Here, it is a haptic touchpad, and that is something I love to see. It's really responsive, it's really good, and that's because they're using the sensil technology. This sensil haptic touchpad here is an excellent implementation. Everything seems to just work as intended. The feedback is really good, and it's just been a pleasure to use. And by the way, I forgot to talk about in detail in yesterday's video on the Surface Pro 11, the flex keyboard that I was using does use the sensal technology in terms of the haptics in that touchpad. So, really good results in that one as well. It's the first time I've seen a type cover that you can detach with the sensil type haptic touchpad, and that was working out really well. Now, another area that has been really, really a nice pleasant surprise here has been the sound out of the

speakers. Now, it doesn't have speaker grills per se, but it does have something called omnisonic speakers, where the sound emanates out of the keyboard. It also has support for Dolby Atmos, and that certainly helps with the spatial audio and the overall volume. The mids, the bass, everything seems to be really good and fills up a room rather nicely. This has been a nice experience in terms of the audio, and I'll talk more about it in the upcoming full review, and I'll give you some audio samples. Then, now when it comes to performance, so far 48 hours in, I've been noticing that on the benchmarks I was able to run, not all of them were able to run. I'll talk more about that separately, but good single-core, multi-core performance here. In fact, on the Geekbench 6, 2835 single-core, 14370 multi-core, which is quite impressive for this chipset. And I would say on the Cinebench 2024, it got a single-core score of 123, which was excellent, but it is shy of

the Apple MacBook Pro 14 that I looked at, and I would say that is very good multicore. Although I was hoping for a little bit higher, it scored 680. Although I'm not surprised by the Numbers here, but we'll see as time goes on as things get updated. Now when it comes to the internal or integrated adrenal Graphics here, uh, it's going to have some interesting results here, but I don't think you're going to get as good as the Intel art Graphics or the Radeon 78m from AMD. Uh, we're seeing not quite as good on that, and that's not a big surprise. And as you'll know, gaming is been pretty Hit or Miss in terms of the titles, what will work, what won't. We'll have to get into that separately in the full review, but again, gaming has been a little bit Hit or Miss as well as highly specialized things like video editing and so forth that some things may work, some things may not work. Again, it is early days, so hopefully updates will fix that. Now again, it's using emulation for

x86 apps, and it is a far cry from the terrible results we were getting in prior generations with Windows and ARM. This is a much better situation. Microsoft is using something called Prism, and that just seems to be head and shoulders above what was used before. This is actually working out pretty well, although not everything will work. Not all drivers are there. I couldn't get my colorimeter to work is one good example. Some older printers will not work, and that's just a driver issue, not an emulation issue. Now, there are certain benchmarks I couldn't get working either. PC Mark 10, I couldn't get my battery test done on that. So, just some things that are early on bugs that you just can't get around. So, we will just have to wait and see as things progress as they do update and fix things as things go along. So, just stay tuned. Things will get better over time. I'm pretty sure of that. Now, I've only had this for about 48 hours or so, and I

did my initial battery test, and I'm seeing great news here, folks. Excellent result here. Now, what I did was I looped a 4K video streamed over YouTube, so it is using Wi-Fi, and that will take up some battery, so keep that in mind. At 120 HZ enabled screen brightness at 40%, and I got an amazing 20 hours and 9 minutes of video playback before it dropped dead, before it ran out of juice. Now, if it was local video playback with Wi-Fi turned off, I would imagine it's even longer. Now, that was a 4K video that I was streaming, by the way, and that is a pretty phenomenal result. Of course, I will do further testing in my upcoming full review. Now, I couldn't get my PC Mark 10 Modern Office test to work or any of the associated test for that because it just wouldn't work on this Windows on ARM. Again, has been a little bit hit or miss with certain benchmarks and so forth, so just keep that in mind. But overall, battery life is looking

pretty special here all right. Let's talk about thermals. When you put this under heavy load where the CPU is going 100%, the fans will kick in. You will notice the fans, although not the loudest I've ever heard, and it stayed relatively cool. But you'll notice a few warm spots here and there. But when you're doing everyday tasks such as Microsoft Office, email, web browsing, everyday kind of use, the fans very rarely kick on, and it doesn't get warm. At least, it doesn't get hot, that's for certain. It doesn't even get a little bit warm. It stays relatively cool. And that's something we've been wanting to see a long time on a Windows laptop. Doesn't sound like a jet airplane is taking off every time you open the laptop up to use. This thing stayed relatively cool and quiet. Again, it's just when you're pushing it under heavy load. When I was running the benchmarks, you will sometimes notice the fans kick in, and you will notice that it Go gets a little bit warm. But I think

for the most part, they've delivered not only on the battery life but also on the thermals here, keeping it cool and quiet. Okay, let's bring it all home. 48 hours in with the Surface Laptop 7 running the Snapdragon X Elite, and I got to say I am super impressed in some areas, but of course, I'm a little let down in some of the compatibility issues I've been having. But it's not specific just to the Surface Laptop 7, but on some of the others that I'm reviewing here. We'll talk more about that soon. X86 apps have been a little bit hit or miss, depending on which app you're talking about. Gaming has been a little bit hit or miss, but I got to tell you I think they delivered here on the battery life big time. They really came through here, excellent battery life on this. The single and multi-core performance on that CPU have been excellent. Graphics have been okay, not quite as good as the Surface. Graphics have been okay, not quite as good as the Intel art Graphics.

or the Radeon 78m that we've looked at here in 2024. So, you know, not going to be quite is good, and I would say if you're using this for general purpose use for web browsing, Microsoft Office, email, and the like, this is a pretty phenomenal device, especially with that excellent battery life. This is going to be great for media consumption on a CrossCountry flight. You won't have to worry about losing juice. This thing will last. It will keep going on and on and on, and that's what I've been seeing on this. This thing has been phenomenal. You will notice some heat when you are doing full load CPU loads here. Uh, you will notice the battery. You will notice a little bit of fan noise as well, but nothing to be too concerned about. I'll get more into that in the upcoming full review, but I am extremely impressed with this Surface Laptop 7, especially with its improved display, the excellent battery life, the good CPU performance. I just wish they would iron out some of the kinks. I think that will happen over time as this is a

first-gen product in terms of the CPU, and I think it will get better as they update it. So, stay tuned. More to come on this, a full review, but my initial impressions 48 hours in. I'm pretty impressed here. So, please hit the like button. Please subscribe. Please share this video. Don't forget to leave a comment in that comment section below. Let me know how I'm doing. Let me know if there's a device or something out there you think I should review. I'll do my best to try to make that happen. Don't forget to check me out on Facebook, Instagram, and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. And don't forget to check out my website, AMDTechReviews.com. So, until next time, this is Andrew, and I'll see you in the next video. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Surface Laptop 7 (2024) First Look REVIEW: THE DAWN OF A NEW AI ERA?

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