Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop could be the most impressive laptop the company has ever made. It has a modern chassis with thin display bezels and a new Arm-based CPU that might just give Apple laptops a run for their money when it comes to performance. That’s no mean feat, considering Apple’s striking lead since 2020, but we won’t know how it compares until we get a Surface Laptop in hand. That didn’t stop me from diving deep on their specs to see how they compare on paper.

Before we get to the real nitty-gritty, let’s take a look at some of the most obvious differences you’ll see between the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air.

What’s it gonna cost you?

The M3 MacBook Air starts at $1,099 for an 8GB model, which already puts it at a disadvantage since it’s $100 more than the $999.99 Surface Laptop, which also gets 16GB of RAM out of the gate (more on that later).

Both can get much spendier, though. Spec up the Surface, and you can spend $2,499.99 for the preorder-exclusive 64GB RAM 15-inch model with 1TB SSD and a Snapdragon X Elite. For the same price, you can get a 15-inch MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM and 2TB SSD.

Let’s get physical

At first glance and from certain angles, the Surface Laptop and MacBook Air look very similar. Both laptops are encased in metal and feature thin display bezels, chicklet-style keys, and big haptic trackpads.

The Surface Laptop uses Windows Hello face authentication, rather than a fingerprint sensor, for logging in. The MacBook Air, despite having a notch drooping down into the screen since 2022, has no Face ID and uses Touch ID fingerprint scanning instead, which works well, but still.

The 13-inch MacBook Air has a higher native resolution (2560 x 1664) compared to the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop (2304 x 1536). Likewise, the 15-inch Surface Laptop has a 2496 x 1664 resolution to the 15-inch Air’s 2880 x 1864 resolution. That means the MacBook Air can show a little more information on its 16:10 ratio screen than the 3:2 ratio Surface. But Microsoft’s laptop has a touchscreen, which no Macs have, and a 120Hz variable refresh rate, which only MacBook Pros get.

The Surface has more ports than the Air, too. Both companies’ laptops have 3.5mm headphone jacks and dual USB 4 Type-C ports, but the Surface Laptop also has a USB-A port and the 15-inch model gets a microSDXC card reader. MagSafe helps the Air a bit by freeing up a USB-C port when charging.

Microsoft says the Surface is its thinnest, lightest laptop ever, but it’s still a bit chonky. It weighs 2.96 pounds or 3.67 pounds and is 0.69 inches or 0.72 inches thick, depending on whether you get the small or large one. The MacBook Air, on the other hand, sits at a waifish 0.44 inches thick (or 0.45 for the 15-inch) and weighs 2.7 pounds or 3.3 pounds. Small differences, yes, but they’re quite noticeable when you’re handling a laptop.

What’s inside counts

The crucial factor in Apple’s performance has been how much power it actually uses to get there. Plenty of Intel and AMD laptops have offered better raw performance, but nobody has really touched Apple when it comes to the energy cost, at least until now.

The Surface and Air have similar battery capacities. Microsoft rates the Surface Laptop at either a nominal 54Wh in the 13.8-inch or 66Wh for the 15-inch. Microsoft says that amounts to 20 or 22 hours of video and 13 or 15 hours of web browsing, depending on whether you’re using the smaller or bigger Surface. The MacBook Air is similar, with 52.6Wh for the 13-inch model or 66.5Wh for the 15-inch Air, good for 18 hours of video and 15 hours of web browsing, according to Apple.

But don’t count on those numbers. The two companies detail on their specs pages how they tested, but it’s not particularly helpful for comparing without real-world testing. For instance, Microsoft bases the 20-hour number on playing a 1080p video on a Surface with 256GB storage, 16GB RAM, and a Snapdragon X Plus, with brightness set to 150 nits. Apple, on the other hand, tested an M3 MacBook Air, also using 1080p video, with the brightness set “8 clicks from the bottom.” Depending on the panel, that can be similar to 150 nits, but there’s no guarantee.

Microsoft’s laptop also has 16GB out of the gate, while the MacBook Air has 8GB to start. You can argue about whether that’s enough for basic use and about the merits of Apple’s “unified memory” approach, but 16GB of RAM is still double the working memory, and the Surface machine can be configured up to 32GB (or 64GB in early preorders), whereas Apple’s machine tops out at 24GB. That means you can probably do more memory-intensive tasks on a Surface Laptop before it starts bogging down.

But as far as just pure performance, Microsoft hasn’t been specific about how the Surface Laptop performs with a 10-core Snapdragon X Plus or 12-core Elite chip. Qualcomm says those are all “performance” cores, rather than splitting the work between those and “efficiency” cores the way Apple and others do. That means the Snapdragon X chips don’t farm easier work to cores that aren’t as performative but that use less power. Still, the company also claims they’re more efficient than Apple’s chips. So we’ll have to wait and see how they compare in practice.

But Microsoft did claim at its May 20th Surface AI event that so-called “Copilot Plus PCs” will be “58 percent faster” than an M3 MacBook Air. The company wasn’t specific about whether this was Snapdragon X-equipped machines, but those are the first Copilot Plus PCs, so it’s possible.

Microsoft spent more time talking about the AI chops because it clearly wants these machines used for AI tasks. The company says the neural processing unit (NPU) in the Surface can carry out 45 trillion operations per second, or TOPS (that’s the number of mathematical equations it can solve per second). That’s more than double the 18 TOPS Apple claims for its Neural Engine chip in the M3. It’s even more than the M4 that’s in the new iPad Pro, which Apple says can pull off 38 TOPS. That’s impressive, though TOPS is a bit arbitrary since it doesn’t tell us much about workload being carried by the chip.

But all of this processor talk is just talk at the moment — comparing specs and reading tea leaves. We still need to see these devices in action, outside of demos, to get a real sense of their power. Thankfully, we don’t have to wonder for much longer how the Surface Laptop and all of the other Snapdragon X-equipped machines will do. The Surface is up for preorder and ships on June 18th, and others are coming from the likes of Dell, Asus, Lenovo, and Samsung.