You can charge it through USB-C, which makes the Surface Connect port even more baffling.
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MICROSOFT KNOWS
how to make a good portable machine, but the Surface Laptop often pales against the funkier Surface Pro tablets. This latest iteration, which brings with it the Snapdragon X Elite processor and the Copilot+ designation, is far from boring. Sure, the keyboard may not detach to enable you to use it like the kind of slate popularized by Apple, but this remains a fine laptop that helps show off the potential of this exciting new processor.
There’s one thing in particular that lets the Surface Laptop—and so far all Copilot+ machines—down. And that’s the GPU. While a lot of work and marketing budget has gone into supporting the Hexagon NPU, which puts out the 45TOPS necessary for that Copilot+ badge and means your AI workloads aren’t shunted off to the cloud, the graphics capability of the Snapdragon X lite chipset is way behind. It posts a score in 3DMark’s Time Spy test three times lower than that of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 laptop GPU, and the integrated graphics in Intel’s Core i9-13900H beat it, too. Not to be unfair to the Snapdragon—it’s not a gaming laptop and nor is it a gaming chipset (when asked about gaming, MS told us to stream using the Xbox app)—it does very well in CPU-based tests, the 12 ARM cores putting it ahead of Apple’s eight-core M3 chip from the MacBook Air in multicore benchmarks, although it’s a bit slower in single-core tasks.