I have been following along for the whole Copilot+ PC journey since it started with Qualcomm announcing the Snapdragon X Elite processor last year in Hawaii. I attended the Microsoft event announcing Copilot+ PCs this May, then witnessed the launches of systems in June and July. I have also written about Copilot+ PCs and what they mean for the Windows ecosystem and the broader AI landscape. In the past couple of months, I’ve received multiple Copilot+ PCs from HP, Microsoft and Lenovo. Each system runs almost the same Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip, but each has its own approach to implementing the Copilot+ PC concept.
System Specs: Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, HP EliteBook Ultra, Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x
All of these laptops are some variants of 14-inch notebooks, albeit with drastically different display technologies—which is great because differentiation is essential. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 has a 120-hertz 13.8-inch 600-nit IPS touch display running at 2304 x 1546; the HP EliteBook Ultra has a 60-hertz 14-inch 300-nit IPS touch display with 2240 x 1400 resolution; Lenovo went for an upgraded display on the Yoga Slim 7x with a 90-hertz touch OLED display with 2944 x 1840 resolution, which also explains why the Lenovo battery is 70Wh while the Surface is only 54Wh and the HP is 59Wh. I believe that Microsoft targeted this battery size to make it even more comparable to Apple’s MacBook Air 13, which has a 52.6Wh battery. All three Copilot+ PCs ship with 512GB of storage and a minimum of 16GB of RAM—parameters established by Microsoft for all Copilot+ PCs.
Interestingly, the EliteBook Ultra and Yoga Slim 7x ship with the E78 variant of the Snapdragon X Elite, while the Surface Laptop 7 ships with the E80. The fastest tier of the Snapdragon X Elite chips, the E84, can be found in the Samsung Book4 Edge 16, which I recently started testing. Some OEMs told me they didn’t think that SKU was worth the added power and thermals to achieve its level of performance and instead opted for the other two processor SKUs. The Surface Laptop 7 ships with a 39-watt charger, while the EliteBook Ultra and Yoga Slim 7X both have 65-watt adapters.
For me, the most interesting configuration differences came in the ports chosen by each vendor. HP and Microsoft both offer a headphone jack, while Lenovo has ditched it entirely. Lenovo did, however, provide three USB-C PD 3.1 ports with DP 1.4 capability, though it opted not to have a USB-A 3.2 port like Microsoft and HP did. I believe this was a conscious decision to make the laptop thinner, with Lenovo claiming that it is as thin as 0.51 inch (12.9mm), compared to the Surface Laptop 7’s 0.69 inch (17.5mm). That said, HP’s EliteBook is also very thin at only 0.33 inch in the front and 0.44 inch in the back. All of these devices are so thin that they easily fit into my backpack’s tablet slot.
For Wi-Fi, Lenovo and Microsoft opted for Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi 7 chipset, while HP went for Qualcomm’s older Wi-Fi 6E chipset, which I was not expecting. Ultimately, these PCs are going to need good Wi-Fi connectivity, and I was a little surprised to see HP not go for the best-in-class option. All three laptops come in under 3 pounds, which is also a spec that I believe Microsoft and the PC OEMs tried to hit with these systems. Not coincidentally, the MacBook Air 13 weighs 2.7 pounds. Of the laptops in this roundup, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x comes the closest to the MacBook Air at 2.82 pounds, even though it has the largest battery by far.
More Choice Is Better
I have used these three laptops over the last couple of months and the thing that has stood out to me the most is that each of them very much feels like it’s targeting a different type of user. The Surface Laptop 7 aims for the most premium consumer with a very refined design, premium touchpad and a bright, super-high-res, high-refresh-rate 3:2 IPS display. Without a doubt, it delivers the most straightforward Windows 11 and Copilot+ experience, which makes sense because that’s what a Surface laptop is really supposed to be.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x has a gorgeous high-resolution OLED display while also having three of the most capable USB-C ports. The HP EliteBook Ultra exudes premium with its ultra-thin design and various USB ports, including a collapsing USB-A port. The EliteBook Ultra really leans into the security aspect of being a premium commercial notebook and makes you feel safe and secure by including HP’s Wolf Security suite.
What I like about these laptops is that while they aren’t perfect, they do satisfy different consumers. I think that’s extremely important if Microsoft and Qualcomm want to ensure that Arm-compatible Windows laptops are going to be competitive with MacBooks and other PCs. They are also priced competitively, with the Yoga Slim 7x coming in at a reasonable $1,199 and both the Surface Laptop 7 and EliteBook Ultra coming in at a slightly pricier $1,399. The EliteBook Ultra MSRP was $1,700, but at the time of writing was discounted to $1,390. A comparable MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage starts at $1,499; even if you subscribe to the theory that MacBooks can get away with less RAM (which I do not) then even $1,299 for a MacBook Air with less memory is very much in this price range for a laptop that has a slower NPU, fewer ports and no touchscreen.
Benchmark Performance And Thermals, Including AI
I benchmarked these systems against each other. One thing to consider is that none of them has the fastest Snapdragon X Elite CPU, which, as mentioned earlier, is available only in the Samsung Book4 Edge 16. (My thoughts on the Book4 Edge will come in a separate review.) The Surface Laptop 7 had the fastest GeekBench 6 results, which should surprise nobody, considering it has a faster CPU.
While I was writing this review, Primate Labs, the maker of GeekBench, released a new AI benchmark that can test the NPU. This new test has three different scores: Full Precision, Half Precision and Quantized. In my testing, I found that only in Full Precision did the Surface Laptop perform the best, followed by the EliteBook Ultra and the Slim 7X. All of the Half Precision and Quantized results are roughly the same, which makes sense because all three machines are using a Qualcomm NPU with the same performance. The Yoga Slim 7x also edged out a win in Cinebench R24 multicore, which I found surprising. All three laptops had roughly the same performance in 3Dmark Steel Nomad for 3-D graphics, which translates to similar graphics performance for gaming.
For gaming purposes, I tested CounterStrike 2 on medium settings, and it was mostly playable, but with some stuttering at times. The Yoga 7x had the worst average frame rate, at 33, while the EliteBook Ultra and Surface Laptop each had a 45 FPS average. The other game I tested at low settings was Control because it supports AutoSR, an NPU-accelerated feature that improves frame rate through its AI-enhanced Super Resolution feature. For this game, all three laptops averaged over 60 FPS, with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x being the fastest. These laptops were never intended to be used for heavy gaming, but for casual gaming they should suffice, and with time I do believe game support will improve. This will happen especially if Qualcomm and Microsoft intend to get the Snapdragon X Elite processor into a gaming handheld.
For content creation, I set up my own test suite for Lightroom, taking 236 different 61MP RAW images and processing them into 100% full-size JPEGs at full quality. I established a baseline with my desktop of 2 minutes 23 seconds; for reference, my desktop features a 16-Core AMD 7950X and RTX 4080 Super GPU with 48GB of Patriot 6000 MT/s DDR5 memory. Working from this baseline, these laptops did an incredible job of processing this considerable workload at roughly 5 minutes each. The Yoga Slim 7x was the fastest at 4:54, the Surface Laptop 7 was not far behind at 5:22 and the EliteBook Ultra was last in a still very respectable 5:33.
The Luminar Neo photo editor was the application that made the NPU work the hardest alongside the GPU; that app took a single 61MP RAW image and applied a sharpening and blur algorithm to it. In that workload, the Surface Laptop 7 finished first in 2:13, while the Yoga Slim 7x was not far behind at 2:17. Again, the EliteBook Ultra came in close behind at 2:31. One thing to consider here is that the EliteBook Ultra is very similar to the HP OmniBook X, which would probably perform slightly faster since it isn’t running as much security at the OS layer and below.
For connectivity, I tested the Wi-Fi and USB performance and found that most connectivity on this platform might be capped by CPU performance. Transferring files from the CFExpress memory card on my desktop happens at around 850 MB/s, but on all three laptops it was capped at around 650 MB/s, with the Surface laptop being ever so slightly faster at 660 MB/s. For Wi-Fi, it was no surprise that the two laptops with Wi-Fi 7 chipsets performed better in both download and upload speeds. The Yoga Slim 7x nearly capped itself on my download speed at 822 Mbps while it hit my upload cap at 958 Mbps; the Surface Laptop came in second at 770 Mbps down and 956 Mbps up. The Wi-Fi 6E EliteBook Ultra performed a bit worse, with a download speed of 631 Mbps and an upload speed of only 477 Mbps. The EliteBook Ultra also had 1ms slower latency at 7ms, versus 6ms on the other two laptops.
For thermals, these laptops have very different designs—all of them actively cooled by fans. I found that, among the three laptops, the Surface Laptop was the most notably hot on the keyboard deck when in use, but all of them hovered around 48 degrees C after 10+ minutes of sustained gaming. That said, the Surface did get a bit hotter at 49.2 degrees C, while the Lenovo hit 48.3 degrees C and the HP 47.5 degrees C. (Idle temperatures were negligible at a measured 33.5 degrees C.)
Overall, it seems that HP had the best thermals, which is impressive because it is also the thinnest of these machines. I did not measure exhaust temperatures, which tend to run hotter since they generally do not affect the user as much as the deck and lap temperatures. Another thing to consider when it comes to thermals is that the Surface Laptop 7 is running a higher-clocked version of the Snapdragon X Elite chip, which is also likely to run a bit hotter.
Battery Life
One thing to consider with these laptops is that most of the testing was done using the “performance” power plan, which delivers the best computing results but does not optimize for battery life. Meanwhile, the “balanced” power plan will lower your benchmark results ever so slightly but will give you terrific battery life. In fact, with all three of these laptops, there was no problem going a full day without plugging in, and in some cases I even went multiple days. The thing that really blew me away wasn’t just the screen-on time, but also the standby power.
As someone who primarily uses desktops, I absolutely hate the experience of grabbing a laptop on my way out the door, only to realize later that the laptop has died because I didn’t put it on the charger before I left. With these laptops, you can get anywhere from two to three weeks of standby time based on my experience, which is incredible because it really makes these laptops always ready to go when you need them. The official battery-life benchmarks from our friends at Signal 65 have shown that the battery life is better than that of Apple’s MacBook Air using a battery comparable to that of the Surface Laptop 7.
User Experience
I will start by saying my experience with all three machines has been nothing short of fantastic. This is the first time in a very long while that I am genuinely excited about the PC platform outside of gaming. While I do believe that Microsoft overcorrected based on the pushback about the Recall feature, I do agree that Recall should have been opt-in—and maybe made available in beta first. Microsoft now says that it will reintroduce Recall in October for Insider builds, and that when Recall is relaunched the company will give more details on the updated security for it. That aside, the AI-driven “live translate” feature works seamlessly, and I was delighted with how well AutoSR worked—giving me a solid 60-plus FPS—when playing Control.
While I do believe that some of the other AI applications are interesting, many of them still have only a few features that leverage the NPU, and I’d like to see more use of the NPU across more applications. Speaking of apps, the amount of native ARM64 apps has improved considerably across this year; even Google Chrome has gotten ARM64 support, which I believe was the biggest hurdle for many users (including myself). Emulation also works great, but there are definitely some apps, including VPNs and anti-cheat apps for certain games, that don’t work in emulation mode yet.
One of the great features of all these laptops is the implementation of the Windows Hello sign-in feature, which meant that I rarely had to type my password or PIN into the PC. The EliteBook Ultra and Yoga Slim 7x have presence detection, which adds an extra layer of security but is also a clever trick for saving power because it turns off the display and locks the laptop when you walk away. (This saves so much power because the display is always the biggest power hog on a laptop.) I think that presence detection should be made a standard feature that comes along with Windows Hello support—which, unfortunately, not all OEMs have implemented yet.
For my own workflow, I have been genuinely impressed with these laptops’ overall responsiveness and performance. Switching between them, I don’t feel like I am losing anything going from one to the other. The one thing that I felt was missing from these laptops was 5G connectivity, which was promised initially by Dell for the Latitude and Microsoft for the Surface Pro 11 5G. It seems that the Surface Pro 11 5G will probably be aimed at business users rather than a consumer device; it is arriving in September and might align perfectly with promotions like T-Mobile’s new Partner Plus program, which includes a $400 subsidy for 5G-connected laptops.
Do Copilot+ PCs Deliver?
If you look at the Copilot+ PC as something designed to give Apple a run for its money, then yes—they absolutely deliver. The three models I tested (along with the dozen other models available) have done a fantastic job of reinvigorating the PC sector and putting a fire under AMD and Intel to make their x86 processors more competitive as well. We have yet to see what Intel’s Lunar Lake chip has to offer, but based on the AMD Ryzen AI 300 I’ve been testing inside the Asus ZenBook S 16, there might be some genuine competition brewing. While AMD and Intel AI PCs don’t yet have access to Copilot+, they are expected to by the end of the year.
I think that some of the AI features on Copilot+ PCs are already delivering real performance and experiential improvements, although I also believe that the lack of Recall does take something away from the total experience. AutoSR, Studio Effects and Live Captions work seamlessly as OS-level features, which I think are super important to making something like Copilot+ a true AI PC platform. Like I’ve said before, I want to see more developers taking advantage of the NPU and, hopefully, the Copilot Runtime and DirectML. But to achieve that, Microsoft also needs to push the marketing around Copilot+ PCs to developers even harder than it already is.
So, Who Should Get What?
If you’re a gamer, stick to x86 for now. Game drivers have a long way to go, and we’re probably a generation or two away from having a Snapdragon X-like chip in a Windows gaming handheld that works well. Moving beyond that, for productivity and general content consumption, all three of the laptops I tested are great, even though I think the OLED display in the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x makes it a slightly more content-consumption-friendly device.
I believe the Surface Laptop 7 is the best all-rounder and probably the most premium-looking of the three laptops, with some of the best workmanship and easily the best touchpad thanks to Sensel. This is why I think the Surface Laptop 7 is the best competitor against the MacBook.
For lots of typing, I prefer the HP EliteBook Ultra or the Surface Laptop 7. For battery life, I like the Surface Laptop 7, which got me weeks of standby—and has the least extra software. The McAfee software on the Yoga Slim 7x got very annoying very quickly, and the HP Wolf Security software may not be suitable for everyone, although it is definitely a valuable business-centric security feature.
Where Do We Go Next?
It looks like this journey will continue at the IFA trade show in Berlin in September, where we’ll see more launches from Qualcomm and its OEM partners. I suspect that’s where we’ll also get more of the 5G flavors of Copilot+ PCs that we’ve been promised. It also appears that Intel will have some Lunar Lake responses to Qualcomm like it did at the Computex show a couple of months ago, and potentially an official Lunar Lake launch. AMD will also likely have more Ryzen AI-based systems to talk about to counter Qualcomm’s and Intel’s narratives. ]
This month we will also see new systems including HP’s OmniBook Ultra, which has a super-special 55 TOPS NPU. That sounds good, though I’m unclear how much of a difference it will make at this point. Later this year, Intel and AMD systems with NPUs capable of over 40 TOPS will get a Copilot+ update to match all the AI capabilities of the Snapdragon X Elite systems that I’ve reviewed here. That will make for some fun benchmarking and comparisons, but also should help developers trying to build AI apps reach a broader audience, even if it means having to support multiple NPUs. Also, with the launch of GeekBench AI, we can finally get some consistent NPU performance benchmarks across the different NPUs, even if AMD’s NPU isn’t supported at the moment. Stay tuned.
