One theory is that Microsoft has more interesting Surface Pro 10’s and Surface Laptop 6’s launching as early as May 20, and these are the ones they will let people like us review.
May 20 is when Microsoft is expected to launch the consumer-oriented versions of the Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10 (as opposed to the business-only versions that start shipping next week), possibly bridging the unfortunate gap that has opened up between Apple’s various MacBooks and everyone else.
Comes with chips
The consumer Surfaces are expected to come in two flavours, Intel-based and ARM-based, and it’s these ARM machines that are of particular interest. They’re expected to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips, which promise the very same things Apple’s ARM chips offer: great performance including pretty decent graphics performance, and great battery life, all at the same time.
Intel chips, by contrast, generally give you good performance or good battery life, and if you want good graphics you have to add a separate graphics processing unit (GPU), which is going to kill the battery even deader than it already was.
Choosing the Qualcomm model over a MacBook or indeed over the Intel model won’t be a straightforward choice for consumers or businesses, however.
Windows on ARM has never worked as well as MacOS on ARM, or indeed as Windows on Intel, so while the Qualcomm versions of the Surface Laptop 10 and Surface Pro 6 may not represent a compromise in performance or battery life, they may still represent a compromise in functionality.
That’s a tricky matrix of factors – CPU performance, GPU performance, battery life and software compatibility – and, from a reviewer’s perspective, that’s so much more interesting than merely reviewing the Intel-only, business-only devices coming out next week.
In that sense, Microsoft is right to not expose its April Surfaces to review. The May Surfaces look so much more interesting.
Our second theory as to why Microsoft isn’t offering reviews of the business-oriented Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 is a corollary of all of this. They’re all Intel-based, and they’re simply not going to review well when benchmarked next to the new MacBook Air.
Of course, how they stack up compared to a MacBook depends entirely on what you’re looking for in a laptop. There is more to life than benchmarking.
Briefing me about the business-only Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10 this week (but not letting me take one away for testing), Microsoft told me that, when it did its research on what businesses are looking for in a laptop or tablet, the number one thing by far was an Intel chip.
The business-only, Intel-only Surface Pro 10 will have 5G options for the first time
Battery life and graphics performance be damned, businesses want Intel, presumably for app compatibility reasons.
The number two thing, interestingly enough, is 5G connectivity.
In the past, that would have meant buying an ARM-based variant of the Surface, but this year Microsoft is bringing 5G to its Intel-based Surfaces for the first time.
The number three thing businesses want in a new laptop or tablet is an anti-reflective coating, which is also coming to the business-only Surface devices.
Believe it or not, battery life was nowhere on the shopping list of items businesses are looking for in a laptop or tablet.
We’re obsessed with battery life here in the Digital Life Labs, so we do find that a little hard to believe. But if Microsoft is right, if businesses only care about having Intel chips and 5G and anti-reflective coatings and none of the things we care about, then it makes a lot of sense that it wouldn’t let us take one away for review. We’d have looked at all the wrong things.
