The Microsoft Surface Laptop 2024 is our Laptop of the Year because it wasn't just a home run for Qualcomm, it helped start the AI PC revolution

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip breathed new life into the Microsoft Surface lineup – and Windows on Arm

Features By John Loeffler published 31 October 2024

If I could point to a single inflection point for the computing industry this year, it would be the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7.

Not only is it an incredible device that features great performance, outstanding battery life, and a design to die for, but the 2024 Surface Laptop is the vanguard of the AI PC revolution that has taken over the industry this year.

With the help of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Elite Plus, Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs finally brought AI out of the cloud and onto your laptop thanks to a powerful enough NPU that can actually perform useful AI workloads.

What's more, it was also the first laptop to bring AI to the consumer market, despite Apple having a nearly four-year head start in local AI hardware with its M-series chips.

In the end, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 not only brought AI to consumers in a practical way, it also threatens the Apple MacBook's coveted FOMO status and gave customers a real alternative to the MacBook while keeping the convenience, familiarity, and practicality of a newly invigorated Windows on Arm platform.

Kicking off the AI PC revolution…

There's been a lot of talk about AI over the last year, thanks to Nvidia's soaring stock price, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Microsoft's aggressive push for its Copilot AI tools, but it wasn't until the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 landed in May that anyone was able to get AI from anything other than the cloud.

Tools like Midjourney and Dall-E for image generation, Claude AI and ChatGPT for text-generation, and generative AI plug-ins for just about every app under the sun have all had to previously rely on an internet connection and a cloud server to process user requests.

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