In the years leading up to Microsoft's Surface Laptop 7's 6/18 debut, the company has spent considerable effort comparing the new Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X-powered computer to the Apple MacBook Air M3. 

This includes beating the pair against each other during Microsoft's Build2024developer conference in a series of performance benchmarks that took place at Microsoft HQ in Washington last month. The Verge summed up these results and showed that despite some skirmishes by Microsoft, the Surface Laptop 7 beat the Cinebench and Geekbench6 multithreaded CPU performance benchmarks on the Air M3. 

The Surface Laptop's Cinebench score was 650 compared to 980 for Air and the Geekbench score was 12,000 compared to 14,000 for MacBook. Not bad, but not significantly better. 

A more interesting result here is the result of the HandBrake ToS test, which measures the time it takes a computer to encode 4K video. The Surface laptop beat the Air M3 in 1 and a half minutes. 

As for battery life, the web browsing test shown by Microsoft showed that the Surface Laptop lasted 16 hours and 56 minutes, while on Air it lasted 15 hours and 25 minutes. The playback of the video was even longer: it lasted 20 hours on the surface and 17 hours and 45 minutes on the air. 

For those interested in AI performance, Microsoft claims that the Snapdragon X Elite NPU is 3 times faster than the M2 AI acceleration task. However, it should be noted that the M4 is particularly discarded so that Apple can focus on AI with its M3 chip. 

Again, these are all claims of scores made by Microsoft. 

In Microsoft's crusade against air M3, two things raise the flag. The surface features a fan that can help with performance, although there is no air M3. Also, Microsoft did not compare the Surface Laptop to the MacBook Pro M3, which has a fan. Also, Apple has just released a new M4 chip, which should be faster and more AI-capable. The chip debuted on the iPad Pro2024 earlier this year and is likely to be unveiled at the next-generation Macbook, which will probably be unveiled this fall, or at WWDC6, which starts on 10 May 2024. The M4 chip is working very well in the Geekbench6 test, so we need to see how Qualcomm's chip is measured.

We will soon get the new Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 for testing and will see how the new Copilot+PC laptop hangs out of the Microsoft environment