Microsoft knows its new Surface PCs are expensive. That’s the point

The Microsoft Surface premium: for years, laptop buyers have criticized Microsoft for charging more and delivering less. Now Microsoft is preparing to ship the Surface Laptop 8 as well as the Surface Pro 12 with Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 processors inside. Will anything change?

No. And yes. Microsoft is not chasing cheaper laptops with these models. It is using Surface to push premium Windows-on-Arm hardware.

Microsoft is launching and shipping the 13-inch Surface Pro 12 at $1,499 on up, versus the $999 and up price Microsoft launched what it called the Surface Pro 11th Edition in 2024. It will also charge $1,599 and up for the 13.8-inch and 15-inch configurations of the Surface Laptop 8, shipping today, versus $999 for the Surface Laptop 7. (Officially, Microsoft is just calling these new models the Surface Laptop and the Surface Pro, which means that you might see them referred to as the Surface Laptop (2026) or the Surface Pro (2026), too.)

Still, Microsoft is hinting that there’s a plan in place to address lower-cost competitors like the Apple MacBook Neo…just not now.

“What I will say is we certainly are aware of pricing pressures,” Brett Ostrum, the corporate vice president of Surface Devices at Microsoft, said in an interview. “We have plans in place to how to address those, but stay tuned. [This] week is about Pro and Laptop. Maybe the week after, we’ll have some incremental news about how to address some lower price point devices.”

That could hint that Microsoft has its smaller 13-inch Laptop and 12-inch Surface Pro waiting in the wings. In the meantime, Microsoft is going to focus on what it does well — leveraging what it calls the top laptop webcam of all, among other new features — and its place in the ecosystem to carry it home.

The specs are surprisingly aggressive

All told, Ostrum said that the split between Laptops and the Surface Pro is still about 50-50 in terms of units sold.

The new 13.8-inch and 15-inch Laptops will include the Snapdragon X2 Plus 10-core chip, as well as the Snapdragon X2 Elite 12-core processor, passing over the 18-core X2 Elite and the 18-core X2 Elite Extreme that Qualcomm launched last year. But the two Laptops won’t skimp on memory or storage, with 16/24/32/64GB memory options, and between 256GB, 512GB, and either 1TB or 2TB of removeable PCIe Gen 4 SSD storage, an upgrade over the 1TB storage cap on the 2024 model.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Microsoft’s updated Surface Pro 12 includes the same specs, though without the 2TB storage option.

Again, Ostrum played cagey when asked about devices with 8GB of RAM. “I think you’ve seen the focus that Pavan [Davuluri, the head of Microsoft’s Windows + Devices team] has shared broadly about our focus on fundamentals,” he said. “Part of that fundamentals work stream is to make sure that 8GB solutions are a viable solution for the OEM ecosystem out there. I am not announcing anything today about Surface and 8GB devices.”

So why buy the new Pro and Laptop?

The Surface Pro is a tougher sell, with very little that’s changed from the previous model excepting the processor. (An OLED display option has been preserved.) Microsoft killed the Sapphire color from the prior generation, leaving just Dune, Platinum, and Black — though the optional Pro Flex Keyboard now ships in Dune, too.

Microsoft will actually bundle a Pro Keyboard for free if you buy before June 30; the catch is that the Pro Keyboard must remain physically attached to the Surface Pro to function, while the Pro Flex keyboard can be detached and works wirelessly. Surface Laptop buyers can get a free Arc Mouse during the same timeframe.

Microsoft will also allow you to trade in an old device for up to $900, the company said.

The 13.8-inch Surface Laptop, meanwhile, ships with a new Jade color, while the 15-inch screen was upgraded from 201 PPI to 262 PPI (3,270 x 2,180) with Dolby Vision IQ support and 600 nits of peak brightness both in SDR and HDR modes. Microsoft also says that the the new 13.8-inch Laptop was also awarded the top integrated webcam by DXOMark, capitalizing on the strength of its webcams Microsoft began highlighting during the pandemic.

In part, that’s because both Qualcomm-based laptops and Apple MacBooks use MIPI cameras, leveraging their history in the smartphone market. Perhaps the biggest advantage that a MIPI camera offers is that it can transmit large amounts of data quickly, while other camera sometimes have to compress their data to achieve the same speed. Somewhat surprisingly, both Laptops use a 1080p camera, but the Pro’s webcam supports up to 1440p resolution.

Matthew Smith / Foundry

Microsoft claims that the Snapdragon X2 is about 58 percent faster than the previous generation in terms of graphics. This is a nuanced measurement; we’ve already seen Qualcomm show off X2 chips with about double the graphics performance of the X1 generation, but those were the Elite Extreme versions, not the slightly less powerful Elite and Plus models. In addition, the cooling of the recent Surface Laptop for Business with Intel’s Panther Lake chip inside was poor enough that graphics performance plunged over a prolonged stress test. Given that Microsoft often leaves the design of its Pro and Laptop unchanged, we could see the same on these new consumer devices, too.

Microsoft is also claiming up to 20 hours of battery life on the 13.8-inch Laptop, and 19 hours on the 15-inch Laptop. I’ve tested an Asus ZenBook A16 laptop with an X2 Elite Extreme chip inside it, streaming video, which I consider to be a better test. That laptop lasted 784 minutes (slightly over 13 hours) which told me that Qualcomm is pushing performance harder than battery life with the X2 generation. Still, thirteen hours of battery life is exceptional.

“ARM on Windows has come a long ways, and so when we leaned into Copilot+ and our Qualcomm partnership from two years ago, internally, it was recognized that if we actually want to move the needle and convince OEMs to come on the journey, Surface has to be all in on this solution,” Ostrum said. “And so, whether it is touch, Windows Hello, pen, Arm with Qualcomm, haptics, or MIPI-based cameras, we are there to lead the ecosystem and help show what is possible.”

The future of Microsoft Surface in 2026

Remember, Dell and Asus and Lenovo and other laptop vendors want to dominate the market. Microsoft doesn’t really see it that way.

Ostrum said that Microsoft doesn’t feel obligated to carry the torch for the entire computer industry. “One of the benefits that we have as Surface [is that] I don’t have to address every single price point that’s out there,” he said.

Yes, the Surface design hasn’t changed, though Microsoft launched the smaller Surface Pro and Laptop — again, which we haven’t seen during this generation — as well as the Surface Book Ultra with an RTX Spark chip from Nvidia inside. Still, Ostrum said, “we feel like the design of the Laptop, the enclosure itself, is a pretty robust and high-quality solution.”

Instead, Microsoft wants Windows PCs to succeed, and it views any other company that doesn’t run Windows as the enemy that the whole of the Windows ecosystem needs to defeat.

“I say that because I’m a part of Windows, and the way Windows is approaching [the Apple MacBook] Neo is to sandwich Neo with OEM devices,” Ostrum added, saying that a product like the Dell XPS 13 will be slightly more expensive at launch, but match it on a promotional price.

“The other version is we will OEM-wise hit Neo with a slightly lower price, and sandwich what is happening there,” Ostrum added, without explaining who the PC OEM was in this case.

Finally, if you were hoping for a Surface gaming laptop — well, that future doesn’t look good.

“I say that about Surface not participating in every single solution out there, because we’ve lived in this space where we are attempting to lead the ecosystem, where the ecosystem is already doing well, or the ecosystem is well positioned — we don’t need to participate there,” Ostrum said.

“An example of that is for the past five or eight years the gaming space from a Windows laptop, in an ecosystem perspective, has been a healthy place. If Surface was looking for just growth, we could have added a device that was a laptop — a high-performance, gaming-focused, rainbow keyboards, lights and bells and whistles and all those things — but the ecosystem is healthy,” Ostrum said. “We don’t need to lead in that space, and so we have chosen not to.”

So for now, Surface equals productivity. I can live with that.