Microsoft Finally Made the Surface Laptop You Wanted, but It’s Not for You

Just a few weeks after increasing the price of every modern Surface PC, Microsoft is now back with an upgrade that’s tailored for IT workers inside their lonely cubicle stack. If you want something less business-focused and lower-priced, we don’t yet know how much a Surface built for the average Joe or Jane might cost.

Microsoft decided to refresh the current Surface Pro and Surface laptop lines from 2024 with its “for business” lineup. This includes a 13-inch convertible Surface Pro with a removable keyboard and touchscreen, as well as a 13.8-inch and 15-inch Surface Laptop. Capping off the new models is a brand new 13-inch Surface Laptop for business. If that last laptop looks familiar, that’s because it’s basically a modified version of the 13-inch Surface Laptop, just with an anti-reflective coating on its PixelSense touchscreen.

Everyone in the new eighth-generation Surface for Business family is getting access to Intel’s latest Panther Lake chips. Previous Seventh Edition laptops came with the ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus or X Elite. The new Surface Laptop for Business 13-inch is the only laptop to support the last-generation Snapdragon X Plus chip, not the new Snapdragon X2 Plus. In her blog post announcing the new units, Nancy Gaskill, vice president of Surface for Business, said Microsoft will have Snapdragon X2-based Surface for Business devices later this year.

For the Surface Pro, you’ll have a choice of mid-range Intel Core Ultra 5 335 or Intel Core Ultra 7 366H chips. It has the same 13-inch touchscreen and a Flex Keyboard that is still sold separately. Buyers also have the choice between OLED or IPS LCD models.

If you want solid graphics performance from your new Surface, just know that the Intel Core Ultra X7 368H chip is limited to the 13.8- and 15-inch Surface Laptop. The highest-end Intel chip of the pack comes with a big GPU for business-types who want to handle some real-time rendering tasks and certainly not slack off with a few hours of gaming in their office.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the company doesn’t have anything to share on consumer devices yet. Recent leaks have revealed that we could see Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models, as well as a Surface Pro 12-inch convertible, but with the latest chips from Intel and Qualcomm.

Each new Surface Laptop arriving this spring is of the “for business” variety, with an additional security suite and other software like the Surface Management Portal and Microsoft Intune. Thus, they cost more. The 13-inch Surface Laptop for business starts at $1,300 with 8GB of RAM, but will cost $1,500 with a 16GB configuration. Prices for a 13.8-inch Surface Laptop for business start at $2,000. That’s $500 more than the initial Surface Laptop 13.8-inch with a Snapdragon X Plus chip.

At this point, I assume you are making some kind of sarcastic expression at your screen. Those prices are not extraordinary. The Dell XPS 14, with the same Intel Core X7 356H chip and a higher-quality OLED display, costs $2,730. When Gizmodo first reviewed that laptop, Dell set the price closer to $2,200. The XPS 16 with the same chip was originally $2,350. Now, it is priced at $2,950.