Hands-on with the Surface Laptop on Arm

The Surface Laptop for non-business types is here, and Microsoft hopes that after four years of Apple Silicon, its new Arm-based “AI PC” has a shot at MacBooks.

The sapphire and slightly pink dune color options are fetching in person, and the 13.8-inch screen size feels generous for the machine’s small footprint. I spent a few minutes playing around with the new Recall feature, which lets you search for things you were looking at on your computer — whether they were in an email, on a website, or in a slide deck. AI-powered search helps you find the right information and presents it in a kind of everything-timeline so you can (hopefully) find the info you’re after and see it in its context. Honestly, it looks like a super useful feature I could use, like, yesterday.

Announced at Microsoft’s Surface AI event today, the Surface Laptop 6 comes equipped with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Plus or Elite, a 10 (or 12)-core Arm chip that Microsoft believes will make Windows laptops competitive with Apple Silicon-powered, energy-efficient MacBooks. One way Qualcomm means to set the Snapdragon X apart is in its core makeup — the company says its chip is all performance cores. Apple and Intel both use a mix of lower-performing “efficiency” cores and performance cores to divvy up tasks and save battery.

The Surface Laptop 6 starts at a base 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, and Snapdragon X Plus processor and can be configured all the way up to a Snapdragon X Elite processor, 64GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. It goes on sale June 18th starting at $999.99 (13.8-inch) or $1,199.99 (15-inch), with preorders starting today.