Microsoft’s powerful MacBook challenger coming to South Africa

Microsoft has confirmed that its premium Surface Laptop 7 range will launch in South Africa next month.

The tech giant’s self-branded notebooks made their debut in South Africa in July 2020, with the first models available being the thin-and-light Surface Laptop 3 and 2-in-1 convertible Surface Pro 7.

These were followed by the Surface Laptop 4 in August 2021.

However, Microsoft Surfaces releases over the past three years have primarily targeted businesses or educational institutions rather than general consumers.

That includes the Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10 launched locally in July 2024.

The company has confirmed to MyBroadband that the Surface Laptop 7, its latest release for personal users, will be rolling out in South Africa in early September 2024.

Microsoft has dubbed the Surface Laptop 7 and the 2-in-1 Surface Pro 11 that will be available alongside it “CoPilot+ PCs”, referring to their deeper integration with AI software.

Microsoft said these laptops will be available in retail stores in South Africa, with more information available in the “coming days”.

One of the major changes with the latest Surface models is their use of Arm-based chips instead of x86 processors made by AMD or Intel.

Arm is the same instruction set architecture used in phone processors, and which Apple uses in its M-powered MacBooks, which have put the company leaps and bounds above the competition in mobile computing performance and efficiency since 2020.

While Arm-based chips have previously been used in Windows laptops and offered great battery life improvements, they fell short in terms of app compatibility and performance.

Enter Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Plus processors, which power the Surface Laptop 7 alongside several recent thin-and-light Windows laptops that have been widely praised by reviewers.

These chips were the result of work by Nuvia, a company founded by former Apple engineers who helped design the latter’s in-house A-series and M-series chips.

While it was initially established to work on Arm-based server processors, Qualcomm acquired the company and pivoted its focus to mobile chips.

The engineers delivered — introducing a processor that has performed exceptionally well in benchmarking and real-life tests.

The Snapdragon X Elite boasts similar single-core performance as Apple’s higher-end M3 10-core chip while outpacing it in multi-core performance in several popular benchmark tools.

Linus Tech Tips’ tests have seen several laptop models’ batteries outlast the MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Air 13-inch with M3 chips.

Microsoft claims the Surface Laptop 7 can run for up to 22 hours on its battery while continuously playing a full HD video file with display brightness at 150 nits.

For continuous web browsing, it has claimed up to 15 hours of battery life.

Based on reviews by reputable tech publications, these claims seem to be holding up well.

Several testers have praised the Surface Laptop 7 and pointed out that it easily rivals the MacBook Air, Apple’s most affordable and popular laptop.

Deep-diving hardware experts Digital Trends gave the laptop a rating of 9/10, praising its fast and efficient performance, bright display, haptic feedback trackpad, and solid port selection.

The Surface Laptop 7 also boasts an ultra-thin chassis, which Mashable described as “mint” and “sturdy”.

A question of price

The pricing of the Surface Laptop 7 in South Africa will be key to dethroning the MacBook Air as the premium thin-and-light laptop of choice.

In the US, the entry-level 13.8-inch display model with a 10-core Snapdragon X Plus CPU, 16GB RAM, and 256GB SSD starts at $999 (R18,097, excluding VAT).

It is competing with the the MacBook Air M2 13-inch, which has the same US price but retails for R22,999 in South Africa.

However, the entry-level MacBook Air comes with 8GB RAM, while the Surface Laptop 7 has 16GB.

The Surface Laptop 7’s maximum RAM of 64GB is also substantially higher than the MacBook Air’s 24GB.

While its storage caps out at 1TB instead of 2TB, it is a fully removable NVMe SSD, meaning the user can increase it at any time, while the MacBook Air’s storage is not upgradeable.

Below are specifications and images of the Surface Laptop 7 models that will be launching in South Africa early next month.

Surface Laptop 7 (South African models)
OS	Windows 11 Home
Display	13.8-inch 2,304×1,546 LCD touch display with 120Hz refresh rate | 15-inch 2,496×1,664 LCD touch display with 120Hz refresh rate
Processor	Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite 12-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus 10-core
Memory	16GB | 32GB LPDDR5X
Storage	256GB | 512GB | 1TB removable NVMe SSD
Graphics	Qualcomm Adreno GPU
Ports	1× USB-A 3.1, 2× USB-C 4/Thunderbolt 4, 1× 3.5mm audio jack, 1× microSD card reader, separate Surface connect power port
Wireless connectivity	Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
Webcam	Full HD (1080p) resolution with Windows Hello
Battery	13.8-inch: 55Wh 15-inch: 66Wh
Chassis material and colours	Anodised aluminium Black or Platinum
Dimensions	13.8-inch: 301×220×17.5mm (1.34kg) 15-inch: 329×239×18.29mm (1.66kg)

Surface Laptop 7 — Black

Surface Laptop 7 — Platinum