Microsoft Surface Laptop 13 (2025) - 13" 256GB (UFS) 16GB Copilot+ PC Review
- Mike - Accounting 4 Cycling
- Mar 6
- 9 min read
Surface & Snapdragon vs MacBook Air & Apple M Silicon! My recommendation comes from twenty-four hours of battery!!!!!
CPU: Snapdragon X Plus (8 Core) RAM: 16GB Storage: 256 GB UFS 4.0 SSD Screen: 13” 3:2 1920x1280 LCD Model: EP2-36981 2095 Color: Platinum MSRP: US$899.99 YouTube: HERE!
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Disclaimer
This is NOT a sponsored post, but I did receive this as a member of Best Buy's Tech Insider Program. As a member of this invitation-only program, I am provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews. I did not purchase this product.
Is this your next MacBook Air?
After a short wait for shipping, my second Surface laptop and seventh Surface device (between personal/school & work) arrived! I was very excited to give this a try since it’s using the new Snapdragon X Plus chipset, and I have yet to use any of the Windows x Snapdragon laptops yet! Well, I’ll just say right away it’s quite the impressive little machine to go up against a MacBook Air and other more premium “off to college” laptops on the market. If you’re shopping for a family member, or yourself, that’s heading off to college then give this Surface laptop a serious look! The impressive processing power, good storage space and RAM with good speeds, spacious 13” 3:2 HD LED screen, and a competitive price. All that capped off with the smooth experience of Windows on ARM, especially after the rough years it took to get here!
[IMAGE OR GALLERY OF PACKAGING & CONTENTS - POSSIBLY SHOOT OR SCREENSHOT COMING SOON...WORK IN PROGRESS :-)]
Powerful Laptop for the Power User
Unboxing – Well packaged from compact but very protective outer shipping box to the actual box for the Surface Laptop! There was definitely a lot of thought put into ensuring this laptop was going to make it safe and make a statement when you open it. The top lifts off to reveal the Surface laptop wrapped in a protective sheath of recycled paper/film, underneath is the 45-watt USB-C charging brick, and USB-C cable. The paper sheath unwraps to reveal the platinum aluminum cased laptop with another paper film sheet keeping the screen safe in transit from the keyboard. The whole process could be excitedly performed in seconds, or patiently done like a therapy session, the choice is yours!
First impressions – This is not the first Microsoft Surface device I’ve gotten my hands on, nor will it be my last! It is incredibly well built, with a clean aesthetic and excellent balance of aluminum chassis, large glass screen, well-spaced chicklet keys, and a large track pad. Mine is platinum in color, very similar to Apple’s silver and other manufacturers’ grey, but the Surface feels at home in platinum. Now, this iteration of the Surface laptop is not perfect… it absolutely fails the single finger screen open test. Not only fail, but to open the screen you either need to get a fingernail between the lid and body or lift from the sides of the lid. I remember on the Surface Laptop 4 I used for years at an old job there was a cutout below the trackpad (much like the laptop I am currently typing this on (ASUS ProArt PX13) and many others that allow quick, convenient access to opening the screen. Maybe this is to sell a loop or strap to attach for easier opening down the road, but that’s a bad design flaw and a reason to drop it down a notch. After you’re used to it it’s less annoying, but it’s still a bad miscue in an otherwise well thought out and gorgeous laptop design.
CPU – Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus 8-Core
Model: X1P-46-100
Total Cache: 30 MB
Max Multi-Core Frequency: 3.4 GHz
Boost Frequency: 4.0 GHz (Single-Core)
GPU – Qualcomm Arduino
2.1 TFLOPS
NPU – Qualcomm Hexagon
45 TOPS
Dual Micro NPU on the Qualcomm® Sensing Hub
Display – 1920:1280 and 3:2 aspect! Not OLED but still impressive! Great color accuracy and responsiveness, works great with the Surface Slim Pen 2 and other WACOM digitizer compatible pens. Beautiful colors, covering the 100% of the Adobe sRGB range! Perfect for enjoying streamed videos and website content, even pretty good for photography and video editing, just don't depend on this screen if you're looking for full accuracy in color grading. With 400 nits of brightness, it's still plenty bright to counter all but the absolute brightest of conditions, and even those, you'll still be able to see the screen, just not as clearly and probably with the glare of the direct light that's shining onto it. Airports, classrooms, boardrooms, and cubicles stand no chance! Except this ONE spot at a cafe/restaurant in Reagan International's Terminal 1 (A) in DC that had a spotlight shining directly on it... It's ultra-hot, bright, and for some reason I get stuck with it and blinding people with the reflection off my bald, sweaty head! I wasn't using this Surface Laptop on that trip, I had my ASUS ProArt PX13 with it's stubbornly bright OLED! (and a government issued laptop, but I wasn't taking that out in public spaces)
Storage & Memory – Well, it wouldn't be the era of AI and AI datacenters without having to address both of these. I hope you like what you get or order what you think you'll need, because although the 256 GB UFS 4.0 solid state drive is mounted in a snazzy m.2 2230 slot and is user replaceable & upgradeable (confirmed by some Reddit users, take that as you will... discussed at length here and less so here), the LPDDR5x RAM is soldered onto the board but that . I was actually pretty surprised this laptop didn't just look like an iPad Pro with a keyboard slapped onto it, or more the screen shifted up a hinge and a keyboard slapped on. Either way, it's more than just a small SoC in a stylish aluminum chassis crammed with enough lithium battery cells to make Anker SOLIX** blush! Even with the SSD being expandable, the current rush for more memory chips by the AI giants has us commoners in a pinch where it is not recommended to buy more memory in the form of storage (SSD or HDD, they're taking the spinning ones too!) or, and especially RAM!
**Obligatory affiliate partnership disclosure here, I am an affiliate of Anker SOLIX for the sole reason that I was able to run most of my bedroom off a C300X solar generator for most of the past year! That was early-mid February through the beginning of December 2025, when it's duties were taken over by Anker SOLIX F3000 and their Power Save Kit to power my entire apartment!😎 This is not sponsored by them or even for them, it's something I bought to counter the AI data center invasion of my beloved Wisconsin and my already high electricity rates climbing even higher! There will be more on all of that in future articles and significantly more on my YouTube Channel, so be sure to check them all out! There's already a good amount, a LOT on balcony solar with the C300X, and even parts of my current upgraded balcony solar system on YouTube. A lot of shorts and a lot of long form coming soon, well, eventually... it's a lot to piece together and edit. NOW BACK TO THE MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP 13" AND OFF MY RANT ABOUT HOW I LOVE SOLAR!**
Performance, but first, that battery life!
Surfaces & I have history - I was able to consistently get over 8-hour days of what would’ve been power-user level computing for me in my freshman and sophomore years of college: a dozen Chrome tabs, OneNote, Word, and a large Excel workbook with YouTube (for music)/Pandora > Tidal > Apple Music (did/does come with my phone plan) running in the background. Now, I used a Surface 3 (yep, 4GB RAM!), an i5 Surface Pro 3, and i5 Pro 6 for undergrad, then treated myself to an i7/256GB/16GB RAM Surface Pro 8 for grad school; I was very used to being able to get a full day of battery life on campus without worry whether or not I had a Surface charger with me (Pro 8 luckily charged via USB-C). Even in my professional life, I used a Surface Laptop 5 without ever worrying about my battery dwindling to 0%! Call that dumb, maybe. I call it knowing that it used a 65-watt USB-C PD charger, kept one in my laptop bag at all times, and that in a pinch an 18-watt Samsung "oldie" fast charger would work in Best Efficiency... ASK ME HOW I KNOW! In all seriousness, the power and efficiency balance of the Surface lineup has been great for a long time, it's just you can also tweak them and ignore the cooling side of efficiency to where it uses the entirety of the magnesium (later aluminum) chassis for cooling, making it near impossible to type ON the device! lol Field engineers, accountants, and financial analysists modeling in a field... it was basically a form of air cooling!
Battery Rundown Test 1 - I ran a battery rundown test with the screen brightness set to 75%, auto brightness on (yes, ON. Oops.), streaming YouTube at 1080p60 off WiFi 6, Windows Power Management set to Best Power Efficiency (so I thought) and it ran to 7% battery life after 14 hours. It didn’t seem right, that was about on par with my ProArt PX13 pushing it’s limits on the same kind of battery rundown test, though I’ve changed it in the last year to be 50% brightness instead of trying to eyeball similar brightness levels. Turns out I still had the power management set to Best PERFORMANCE and it still managed to blast past a full work days’ worth of battery life and to do so at 75% brightness instead of the intended 50%!
Battery Rundown Test 2 - I ran a second battery rundown test with the screen brightness actually set to 50%, auto brightness on (yes, still on), streaming YouTube at 1080p60 off WiFi 6, correctly set to Best Power Efficiency and it ran comfortably to 10% battery life after 24 hours and 15 minutes. One. Entire. Day! That sealed it for me that this is absolutely getting a massive recommendation for incoming college students, kids in high school, my friends looking for a new premium laptop that can last literally an entire day!
Gaming, for Windows on ARM - As far as games, Snapdragon X Plus was able to run most everything I threw at it, even if it meant toning the settings down a bit, nothing looked “bad,” actually the opposite, everything looked good but some of the action scenes in GTA V got a little choppy when too much traffic was involved and chases got too crazy, or in COD the framerate might drop a bit, but I always had more than enough room to adjust lower to free up more performance! I ran most at medium settings, high if it could, aiming for at least 60 FPS, 120 FPS in first person shooters, and the Snapdragon chip did not let me down! Most FPS games did have to run at a little lower settings to achieve consistently high framerates, but the work that Microsoft and the XBox team have done to optimize games from the Windows Store & the Xbox App has definitely paid off! I would still recommend playing with FPS counters off, it's incredible what the lack of that information can do to enhance the experience gameplay and make them feel faster than they are.
Pros:
Incredible 24 hours of battery life!
3:2 Aspect ratio!
Recycled aluminum chassis
Expandable storage via m.2 2230 slot!
100% sRGB accurate HD LED Screen
Full size USB-A & 2x USB-C 3.2 (NOT Thunderbolt 4/USB4... only 45-watts!)
Daily use performance is phenomenal, you'll forget about the battery indicator altogether.
Excellent sound quality, speakers sound and sized well above laptop's size!
See internal shot, the speakers are hilariously large compared to everything else!
Weight, size, durability
Cons:
USB-C is only USB 3.2 NOT Thunderbolt 4 and/or USB 4... limited to only 45-watts!
No expandable RAM (common for ultrabooks, still sad)
Not OLED, becoming more common at the ~$900 price point (see Vivobook S14)
Final thoughts & how to buy
The Microsoft Surface Laptop 13" (Model 2095) compares with laptops such as the MacBook Air and other premium laptops for young adults off to college but still looking to stick to more of a budget than a MacBook Pro, ASUS Zenbook S, Alienware, or other higher-end laptops can command. For those seeking a suitable device for college, or for general use, this Surface laptop offers great processing power, storage capacity, RAM speed, a beautiful 13” 3:2 HD LED screen, and competitive pricing. All these features are integrated with Windows on ARM, which has been refined over several years to make it an easy recommendation! The only, and I mean only reason I am rating this 4/5 is because of the difficulty opening the lid (until you really get the hang of it)! If there was a slightly more pronounced lip or a small cutout like many other laptops to help with this, it'd be 5/5. This battery life with this amount of power is absolutely amazing and truly makes it difficult for me to not just overlook that fault as I type this on it's also excellent keyboard, but I just reopened the lid after a short break and was reminded!
If you've made it this far and have decided to pick up the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13", Buy Now by clicking this Best Buy Creator link if you're look for a more of my content on YouTube, Subscribe Here!
(I may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links. These do not cost you anything, but help support the page, channel, and my reviews!)
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