Microsoft upgrades its smaller Surface Pro and Laptop with Snapdragon X2 Plus

Microsoft has refreshed its compact Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus chip, brighter displays and longer battery life. The upgrades also come with higher starting prices, with both devices now costing more than $1,000.

Both models use the six-core Snapdragon X2 Plus with Adreno graphics and a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU for on-device AI workloads. Microsoft says the new generation delivers more than 60% faster graphics and 95% faster on-device AI performance, along with up to 18% better battery efficiency.

The entry configurations now come with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, while higher-end versions offer 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Microsoft has dropped the previous 8GB configurations that helped keep the smaller Surface devices below the $1,000 mark.

Surface Laptop 13-inch

The new Surface Laptop has a 13-inch, 1920 × 1280 PixelSense touchscreen with a 60Hz refresh rate and brightness of up to 500 nits, a 25% increase over the previous generation.

The fanless laptop weighs about 1.23 kg (2.7 pounds). Microsoft rates it for up to 22.5 hours of local video playback and up to 18 hours of active web browsing.

Surface Pro 12-inch

The Surface Pro 12-inch has a 2196 × 1464 PixelSense touchscreen with a refresh rate of up to 90Hz and peak brightness of 500 nits. The fanless tablet weighs about 690 grams.

Microsoft claims up to 15.5 hours of local video playback and up to 13 hours of active web browsing.

The Surface Pro also introduces Microsoft Ink Canvas, a new AI-powered, pen-first app for sketching, annotating, generating images and summarizing text directly on the canvas. The app comes preinstalled on the new Surface Pro and will also be available for other supported Surface and Windows devices.

Microsoft will offer optional 5G configurations of both computers for business customers.

The company also introduced a redesigned Surface Mouse with built-in haptic feedback and a customizable action button.

The new Surface Pro 12-inch starts at $1,149.99, while the Surface Laptop 13-inch starts at $1,199. Both go on sale October 13, with Black, Platinum and Violet among the available finishes.