Microsoft announces new Surface line with Qualcomm Snapdragon

Microsoft just announced its new line of Surface devices on Monday at a special 'AI Era' press event at its Washington state headquarters. The new devices will come with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chips, potentially making them a very compelling competitor to Apple's latest MacBooks and iPads.

So far we've seen two new devices, the Surface Laptop and the Surface Pro. That's right: no numbers were added to the end of these two, as part of Microsoft's rebranding push in its 'AI Era' of Surface products powered by AI.

The new Surface Laptop has impressive battery life thanks to the new Snapdragon X Elite processor, with up to 22 hours of local video playback and 15 hours of web browsing. Microsoft was also interested in showing off Adobe Photoshop (and other Creative Cloud apps) running natively on the Arm-based processor at twice the speed of Apple's competing MacBook Air M3, along with a new Prism emulation to boot. the gap between Windows on Arm and the existing one. x64 and x86 software.

Meanwhile, the definitely not Surface-Pro-11 is reported to be 90% faster than the 2022 Surface Pro 9 5G thanks to its new Snapdragon chip and offers an impressive QHD front camera, along with a rear camera. which can capture 4K video. Microsoft was also keen to promote the new accessibility-focused design features built into the keyboard and trackpad.