The Microsoft Surface Laptop 2024 is our Laptop of the Year because it wasn't just a home run for Qualcomm, it helped start the AI PC revolution

If I could constituent to a azygous inflection constituent for nan computing manufacture this year, it would beryllium nan Microsoft Surface Laptop 7.

Not only is it an unthinkable instrumentality that features awesome performance, outstanding artillery life, and a creation to dice for, but nan 2024 Surface Laptop is nan vanguard of nan AI PC gyration that has taken complete nan manufacture this year.

With nan thief of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Elite Plus, Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs yet brought AI retired of nan unreality and onto your laptop acknowledgment to a powerful capable NPU that tin really execute useful AI workloads.

What's more, it was besides nan first laptop to bring AI to nan user market, contempt Apple having a astir four-year caput commencement successful section AI hardware pinch its M-series chips.

In nan end, nan Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 not only brought AI to consumers successful a applicable way, it besides threatens nan Apple MacBook's coveted FOMO position and gave customers a existent replacement to nan MacBook while keeping nan convenience, familiarity, and practicality of a recently invigorated Windows connected Arm platform.

Kicking disconnected nan AI PC revolution…

There's been a batch of talk astir AI complete nan past year, acknowledgment to Nvidia's soaring banal price, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Microsoft's fierce push for its Copilot AI tools, but it wasn't until nan Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 landed successful May that anyone was capable to get AI from thing different than nan cloud.

Tools for illustration Midjourney and Dall-E for image generation, Claude AI and ChatGPT for text-generation, and generative AI plug-ins for conscionable astir each app nether nan sun person each had to antecedently trust connected an net relationship and a unreality server to process personification requests.

This is little than perfect for immoderate number of reasons, but nan first generations of section AI hardware for laptops, besides knows arsenic NPUs, simply hadn't been powerful capable to do thing genuinely functional for end-users without having to edifice to unreality processing.

That changed pinch nan Surface Laptop 7, which sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite system-on-a-chip (SoC) that much than doubles nan NPU capacity of nan Apple M3's NPU, and could now beryllium leveraged to make matter from prompts, execute video and audio processing to region inheritance sound and blur backgrounds during video calls (or immoderate video recording, for that matter), make images from matter prompts utilizing Stable Diffusion, and, eventually, supply a measurement to contextually hunt done your computer's history to find mislaid files, resume net searches, and much done Windows Recall.

While different Intel and AMD-powered laptops person since been released that tin do each of this arsenic good (and successful galore cases, do it moreover better), it each started pinch nan Microsoft Surface Laptop 7.

…while breathing life into Microsoft Surface lineup

While nan AI functionality of nan Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 evidently gets a batch of attention, it wouldn't person mattered 1 spot if nan Surface Laptop 7 wasn't besides an unthinkable laptop, and it genuinely is 1 of nan champion laptops you tin bargain today.

I person ever loved nan look of nan Surface Laptop, and nan Sapphire colorway of nan Surface Laptop 7 perfectly pops pinch colour and characteristic (as opposed to nan old and alternatively boring MacBook design). The problem is that nan erstwhile Surface Laptops conscionable weren't bully laptops. Microsoft's Surface Laptop and Surface Pro ever seemed to beryllium a procreation aliases 2 down what everyone else, particularly Apple, was doing, and their value made them excessively difficult to recommend.

Now, however, acknowledgment to nan super-efficient ARM architecture successful nan Snapdragon X Elite SoC, we person a Surface Laptop that is powerful and has all-day artillery life. Before nan Surface Laptop 7, only Apple silicon could connection users 15 to 20 hours of useful artillery life, pinch moreover nan best Windows laptop getting 10-12 hours if you were lucky.

While location are immoderate issues pinch nan caller ARM architecture successful nan Surface Laptop 7, particularly astir app compatibility, that support it from hitting perfection, it still smashes each expectations we had for what nan Surface Laptop statement and Windows connected Arm could do, and for that, it is nan astir compelling Windows laptop I've seen successful years.