Microsoft announced the latest generation of its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with Snapdragon X2 processors on June 16, and the dominant topic of conversation was the $1,499/£1,449.00 and $1,599/£1,549.00 starting prices. It’s an unavoidable subject in the consumer hardware realm today, with budget laptops like the MacBook Neo and Dell XPS 13 drawing massive attention for their sub-$700 pricing.
While the June 16 release didn’t indicate that more affordable Surface options were coming, that is precisely what arrived at the Microsoft Store today. However, if you were hoping for a new competitor to those budget-friendly laptops from Apple and Dell, you’re in for disappointment.
Air pricing for Neo specs
The latest additions to the Microsoft Store start at $849/£800 and $949/£950 for the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, respectively. While this is a substantial discount from the Snapdragon X2 models, it’s closer to MacBook Air pricing than to MacBook Neo pricing, even though the specs seem to be more closely aligned with the latter.
From Microsoft’s perspective, it is the overall hardware quality that would likely put these laptops in the conversation with mid-tier options, rather than true budget options, but is that enough to get buyers to spend up on outdated internals?
The 8GB bottleneck in the AI era
The biggest stumbling block for the new configurations is the 8GB of RAM in the base models, a problem we previously highlighted in the Surface Laptop for Business. Most Windows laptops have had 16GB of RAM as the base option for the last few years, and Apple moved to 16GB as the base option for all of its computers starting in October 2024. Particularly in the AI era, this was crucial and represented a necessary spec for a Copilot+ PC or Apple Intelligence.
This is one of the biggest cost-cutting measures to deliver the newer budget laptops from Apple and Dell, both of which start at 8GB of RAM. This is less than ideal on either platform for all but light users, but it’s certainly more problematic on Windows, and when you aren’t seeing the commensurate savings to go with the spec drop, it is hard to justify.
Microsoft spent the last couple of years pushing the Copilot+ PC, so a nearly $1,000/£1,000 Surface laptop that doesn’t meet the requirements seems ridiculous.
The cuts don’t stop there, either; these laptops use the previous-generation Snapdragon X Plus chips with 256GB of storage. In plain terms, you are finding yourself paying more for less. If you hop in your wayback machine to last year, these are the same models you would have found, starting with 16GB of RAM for $799/£799 and $899/£899, respectively, before jumping to $1,049/£999 and $1,149/£1,099 earlier this year.
I understand what Microsoft is trying to do with these models. It lets them float a lower starting price to get people to click through to the laptops and then walk buyers up to models with more current and competitive specs. However, this still falls short of a true budget laptop, where buyers are more tolerant of trade-offs.
Spending nearly $1,000/£1,000 on a laptop is still territory where you feel like you should get a premium experience, and I’m just not certain that these configurations are going to be able to deliver on that promise.
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