Microsoft has formally announced the new Surface Laptop 8 and Surface Pro 12 with Qualcomm's fresh Snapdragon X2 chips, as promised. They're available today starting at $1,599 and $1,499, respectively, with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage. In a blog post, Microsoft said its next-gen Copilot+ PCs for consumers offer up to 58 percent and 53 percent better graphics performance than their predecessors from 2024, which ran on the original Snapdragon X series chips. Aiming to entice creative professionals, both devices will ship with the graphic design app Affinity pre-installed and pinned to their Start menus.Speaking to Mashable, Andrew Hill, Microsoft's corporate VP of Surface, said the company's biggest priority in developing its new devices was "making sure the fundamentals are great."
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"We are spending a lot of time and energy across Surface and Windows right now on fundamentals, and we should make sure that you have a bunch of that collateral, for lack of a better word, for how those investments are laddering up for reliability, responsiveness, battery life, just across the board," Hill said. "So we spent a ton of energy on those pieces."
Shoppers who purchase a Snapdragon X2-powered Surface Laptop 8 directly through Microsoft now through June 30 will receive a free Surface Arc Mouse ($89.99), and those who buy a Surface Pro 12 this month will receive a free Surface Pro 13-inch Keyboard ($169.99). If you miss the boat, you'll have to buy those accessories separately. The new Surface devices appear to cost roughly the same as their identically specced predecessors, which recently saw late-in-life price hikes due to the global RAM shortage. I'll update this story once I've cross-checked their live listings.This is the second generation of Surface devices where Microsoft has earmarked Snapdragon models for consumers, despite lingering ARM compatibility issues. (The company announced Intel-powered counterparts for businesses last month.) According to Hill, this is because "We find with Qualcomm, the performance per watt and battery life is of high value."Microsoft Surface Laptop 8: What's new (and what's not)
