Microsoft’s 2024 Surface AI event: news, rumors, and lots of Qualcomm laptops

When you launch a game on a Snapdragon on a Windows laptop, you might get an AI frame rate boost from Microsoft’s mysterious Auto Super Resolution (Auto SR) feature. But while Microsoft hasn’t fully explained how the feature works, The Verge can now confirm it’s not Qualcomm technology, not exclusive to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips, and not exclusive to specific games, either.

You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise! Microsoft’s new Automatic Super Resolution help page bluntly states that a Snapdragon X chip is required — see screenshot — and that all of its processing “occurs on-device using the integrated GPU and Neural Processing Unit.”

We’ve heard the story so many times, that this is the time that Windows on Arm will work and we’ll get a revolution in powerful, portable, long-lasting PCs. For a decade, the story has been fiction. This time, though... I don’t know. It sort of seems real.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Tom Warren joins from Seattle to tell us all about Microsoft’s latest event, what a Copilot Plus PC is, how the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop feel, why Recall could be the AI killer app Microsoft needs, and more. If Microsoft is right about how good the Qualcomm X chips are, this could be one of the biggest weeks in Windows history. Don’t forget to subscribe to Notepad!

In addition to the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, Microsoft announced a crop of Copilot Plus PCs from all the major OEMs. Here are all the Copilot Plus PCs announced at Microsoft’s Surface event on Monday.

Not to be confused with the other Swift 14 laptops with AI chips, the Swift 14 AI is the only one with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processor. This one comes with either the base 12-core Snapdragon X Elite chip or the 10-core X Plus chip and goes up to 32GB of memory and 1TB of M.2 SSD storage.

Microsoft announced a whole passel of Copilot Plus PCs at its Surface event on Monday, and Samsung’s entries are a 14-inch laptop and two 16-inch ones, known collectively as the Galaxy Book4 Edge. If you preorder them today, Samsung will throw in a free 50-inch TV! Come on down!

The 14-inch Galaxy Book4 Edge starts at $1,349.99 with a 12-core 3.4GHz Snapdragon X Elite processor with 4.0GHz Dual Core Boost, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD (up to 1TB). It has a 14-inch, 120Hz 2880 x 1800 AMOLED touchscreen capable of up to 500 nits brightness, with HDR and VRR and 120 percent of the P3 gamut. It has two USB 4 Type-C ports, HDMI 2.1, and a combo audio jack. It weighs 2.6 pounds.

It feels like forever ago that we got new Surface laptops, but Microsoft has taken the wraps off a handful of 2024 refreshes at its hardware event on Monday. We’re getting consumer-centric versions of the newest Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, both starting at $999.99 and launching June 18th. Microsoft calls the Copilot Plus PCs “the most powerful Windows PCs ever built.” They’ll be first in line to benefit from Windows 11’s next-gen AI features, which we expect to hear about during Microsoft’s annual Build conference this week.

Microsoft announced business-oriented versions of both laptops in March, each sporting an Intel Core Ultra CPU. The consumer versions come with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X chipsets, which have a dedicated AI processing unit and are said to balance performance and power efficiency in a way that should help them rival Apple’s M-series chips. They also boast the new dedicated Copilot key.

Microsoft has just announced a new Surface Pro, which is part of the new wave of Copilot Plus PCs. The new Pro, which is technically the “11th edition,” starts at $999, comes in four colors, and is powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X processors. The base model comes with a 13-inch LCD screen, but you can upgrade to an OLED in some of the higher-end models. The chip is the star of the show here: it’s what enables a lot of the AI features Microsoft touted onstage, what makes possible the 14-hour battery life Microsoft promises, and more.

The basic silhouette of the hardware hasn’t changed much, save for the new Flex Keyboard attachment. The tablet with an integrated kickstand has been a Surface staple for years now, and Microsoft continues to refine it rather than trying to reinvent it.

The Surface Laptop for non-business types is here, and Microsoft hopes that after four years of Apple Silicon, its new Arm-based “Copilot Plus PC” has a shot at MacBooks.

The sapphire and slightly pink dune color options are fetching in person, and the 13.8-inch screen size feels generous for the machine’s small footprint. I spent a few minutes playing around with the new Recall feature, which lets you search for things you were looking at on your computer — whether they were in an email, on a website, or in a slide deck. AI-powered search helps you find the right information and presents it in a kind of everything-timeline so you can (hopefully) find the info you’re after and see it in its context. Honestly, it looks like a super useful feature I could use, like, yesterday.

Microsoft is confident that it finally nailed the transition to Arm chips — so confident that, this time around, the company spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against the MacBook Air.

On a recent morning at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft representatives set out new Surface devices equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips inside and compared them directly to Apple’s category-leading laptop. I witnessed an hour of demos and benchmarks that started with Geekbench and Cinebench comparisons, then moved on to apps and compatibility.

Microsoft just wrapped up its special event ahead of Build 2024, and it had a lot of exciting news to share. Along with updates to its Surface lineup, Microsoft made some major announcements related to AI and a new era of PCs in partnership with Lenovo, Asus, Dell, and others.

Microsoft didn’t livestream this event, so if you want to catch up with everything it revealed, check out our roundup below.

Following Microsoft’s Windows event, Asus announced its first Copilot Plus PC laptop, the Vivobook S 15 (S5507), driven by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X-series processors. Asus says the Arm-based chip will not only improve a few current Vivobook features but also make new AI-driven programs and workloads fly with 45 TOPS of neural processing power.

The new Vivobook S 15 will have the same OLED display as the previous Intel generation (15.6-inch, 16:9, 2880 x 1620, 120Hz refresh rate, and 600 nits peak HDR brightness), but this specific version will have a thinner chassis and display bezels. The S 15 is configurable with either a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite or 10-core X Plus processor, although the Elite chip will be the base version — the one with a slower integrated GPU and no dual core boost.

On Monday, Acer announced the pending arrival of its first Copilot Plus PC: the Swift 14 AI, which is the Qualcomm Snapdragon version of one of its popular laptops. It will come in two configurations, and both will support a slate of new AI features in Windows 11, like Recall, Cocreator, and Live Captions.

One configuration comes with the base 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor (the one without dual boost) and the other with the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus. Both have the same 45 TOPS neural processing unit, and both laptop models can be configured with up to 32GB of memory and 1TB of M.2 SSD storage.

Buying a laptop from a major maker like HP can be infuriating — mainly because there are too many options. HP and other laptop makers do this to give us all “choice,” but if you are the kind of person who uses “RAM” and “storage” interchangeably, those choices can be confounding — which might be one reason HP’s using today’s big AI and Windows on Arm moment to also clean up its whole lineup.

Gone are the Envys and Pavilions and Dragonflies, and in their places are the consumer-focused OmniBook and the corporate-oriented EliteBook and ProBook. In both cases, the idea is to simplify things for people who just want to buy a laptop.

On Monday, Dell announced that it’s releasing five Qualcomm-configured laptops: the XPS 13 (9345), Inspiron 14, Inspiron 14 Plus, Latitude 7455, and Latitude 5455. That’s more than any other manufacturer has announced so far.

The new XPS 13 is powered by a midrange 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor with Dual Core Boost. (There will also be a 10-core X Plus version but only available in China.) The company says it will support up to 64GB of memory, up to 2TB of PCIe SSD storage (with a 4TB option post-launch), and three 13.4-inch display options: a 500-nit 1920 x 1200 non-touch IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate; a 500-nit 2560 x 1600 IPS touch display with HDR and a 120Hz refresh rate; and a 400-nit, 60Hz 2880 x 1800 OLED touch display with HDR.

Lenovo announced on Monday that it’s adding two Qualcomm-powered laptops to its portfolio: one new Yoga Slim and one new ThinkPad. 

The Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 is the creativity-focused laptop of the two. It will be configured with a Snapdragon X Elite processor, up to 32GB of memory, up to 1TB of M.2 SSD storage, three USB-C ports with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 support, and a 14.5-inch OLED touch display. The whole laptop will weigh just 2.8 pounds and be as thin as 0.51 inches, and it has a 1080p IR webcam that supports Windows Hello. Lenovo claims the Yoga Slim’s battery life will last multiple days, which, if true, could rival the MacBook Pro.

Just days after Apple’s OLED iPad Pro went on sale, Microsoft is bringing the same core display technology to its new Surface Pro. (Also, it’s now just called the Surface Pro; the company has seemingly done away with its numbering.) For the first time, Microsoft’s tablet will be capable of producing perfect blacks along with all the other benefits to contrast ratio, response time, and more that come with the move to OLED. The new panel also supports HDR output, the company said at its event.

The LCDs on previous Surface Pros (and on the business edition Surface Pro 10) were already impressive in terms of color accuracy and sharpness, but Microsoft always stuck to traditional backlighting, which limited just how deep the blacks could go. Now, with per-pixel control, the Surface Pro 10 can make movies and photos appear much more punchy and vivid.

Microsoft just announced the new Surface Pro, the latest in its lineup of tablet / laptop hybrid devices and the first in a new generation of what Microsoft is calling Copilot Plus PCs. The numbers are gone from the model names, which seems to signify a full reboot of the lineup. “Compared to previous Surface generations, it isn’t even close,” said Brett Ostrum, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Surface, at a launch event.

Powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X processors (the Elite and the Plus versions), Microsoft says this new Pro is up to 90 percent faster than the previous model. It also has optional 5G, which tends to come with Qualcomm support.

Microsoft has taken the wraps off the new Surface Laptop — an Arm-based laptop for consumers that’s available for preorder today, starting at $999.99 (13.8-inch) or $1,199.99 (15-inch), and shipping on June 18th. It’s got one big difference from the Surface Laptop 6 for Business announced in March — it’s equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite or Plus chip instead of Intel’s Core Ultra, leveling the playing field, the company hopes, with Apple’s powerful and efficient MacBook laptops.

The Surface Laptop comes in several configurations, starting with a base 16GB of RAM (please take notes, Apple) and 256GB of SSD storage with the Snapdragon X Plus chip, but storage can be bumped up to a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM (though 64GB is available as a preorder exclusive, for now) on both the 13.8-inch and 15- inch versions with the Elite chip. Either model comes equipped with a Qualcomm Adreno GPU. The laptops also come in four colors: black, platinum, dune, and sapphire, although it looks as though only platinum is available for the 256GB base models of both screen sizes.

Microsoft’s launching Recall for Copilot Plus PCs, a new Windows 11 tool that keeps track of everything you see and do on your computer and, in return, gives you the ability to search and retrieve anything you’ve done on the device.

The scope of Recall, which Microsoft has internally called AI Explorer, is incredibly vast — it includes logging things you do in apps, tracking communications in live meetings, remembering all websites you’ve visited for research, and more. All you need to do is perform a “Recall” action, which is like an AI-powered search, and it’ll present a snapshot of that period of time that gives you context of the memory.