Microsoft’s Surface hardware isn’t exactly popular, and things have only gotten worse since the company stopped experimenting with new form factors. But that doesn’t mean Surface isn’t winning in other areas. According to Microsoft, the two new Surface PCs are beating Apple in camera quality.

In a podcast, Microsoft’s Surface boss confirmed that the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro now hold the #1 and #2 spots in DxOMark’s laptop camera quality rankings. For those unaware, DxOMark is an independent lab that tests cameras found in laptops and maintains a frequently updated ranking.

I verified the claims, and DxOMark’s data indeed confirms that Microsoft is killing it with its new Surface PCs. The benchmark is actually quite interesting if you pay attention to the numbers:

The list was entirely dominated by MacBooks until Microsoft stepped up its game. Now, we have the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop in first place with a camera score of 146, followed by the 13-inch Surface Pro with 144 points. The 14-inch MacBook Pro has now dropped to third place, while the M5 model is in fourth place with a score of 135.

The Surface Laptop is ten points ahead of Apple’s highest-ranked MacBook, but the overall winner is still Apple’s ecosystem.

Brett Ostrum, who leads Surface at Microsoft, disclosed the rankings during the podcast and also said the devices deliver 35% better GPU performance than the MacBook Air M5 and 60% better performance on battery compared to the previous generation.

Apple dominates laptops camera quality benchmarks

While Microsoft is doing a great job, its partners are yet to catch up. In the list of the top ten PCs, Apple has five products, Microsoft has three, including a Surface Laptop from 2025, while Lenovo has two ThinkPads. What about other OEMs? They’re lagging far behind, but given Microsoft’s push, I wouldn’t be surprised if others also start catching up.

Historically, Microsoft Surface has set the standard for Windows PCs, and OEMs have followed. It wasn’t until Microsoft made the Surface Pro that Lenovo started pushing Yoga laptops

Microsoft still has an 8GB RAM problem to solve

One of these Surface devices also ships with 8GB of RAM as the base variant. Microsoft no longer says 16GB of RAM is a must, and the shift in its language is largely driven by memory prices reaching an all-time high.

Contrary to what it previously said, the company now argues that 8GB of RAM is good enough for everyday use cases such as browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps.

While 8GB of RAM sounds fine on paper, and it’s quite decent on macOS, you can’t say the same for Windows. Windows 11 still has a RAM problem, with apps such as Teams using up to 1GB of memory. It only gets worse when you open other apps such as New Outlook, which can consume several gigabytes of RAM.

The good news is that Microsoft has promised to reduce RAM usage in Windows 11 as memory prices continue to rise, and we’ll begin seeing better memory management in the coming weeks.

Even then, I still recommend opting for 16GB of RAM because a PC is a long-term investment, and you shouldn’t settle for anything less.

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