A new leak has hinted that Microsoft may be exploring an Intel version of the Surface Laptop 7th Edition. A listing for the device was spotted on Reddit, and it will supposedly coming with a Core Ultra 7 268V processor. The listing has since been removed, but the original listing reportedly claimed that it wouldn’t officially be available until 2025.
A Lunar Lake version of the new Surface Laptop has since been supported by Windows Central’s own sources.
But let’s not forget: It was a big deal that Microsoft debuted its flagship laptop exclusively on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform. Full-throated support of not only Qualcomm, but Windows on Arm as a whole, was the shake-up the PC industry has needed in the wake of Apple Silicon.
Seeing how good Intel’s recently launched Lunar Lake (or Core Ultra Series 2) is, however, it’s not too surprising that Microsoft might want to get in on these new chips. Intel needed a very impressive response to Qualcomm, especially in terms of battery life, and that’s exactly what it delivered.
The idea of a Lunar Lake version of the Surface Laptop 7th Edition is intriguing to me \\. The Qualcomm version has been my favorite new laptop of 2024 so far and quickly secured a spot at the top of our list of best laptops you can buy. It’s been my daily driver since its launch this summer, thanks to its great design and the incredible efficiency of its Snapdragon X Elite chip inside.
But there’s a problem. Since then, the Intel Lunar Lake chips have launched, and they have even better battery life than the Snapdragon X Elite. It was quite an accomplishment to have made in just a single generation, and the latest Surface Laptop would be a perfect vehicle for that extra battery life. Intel’s new chips also have significantly better integrated graphics than the Snapdragon X Elite.
Broader performance comparisons between the two chips depend on the use case, but you could certainly make the argument that Intel’s option is better overall for this type of device.
It’ll all come down to price, however. The Qualcomm version of the Surface Laptop 7th Edition started at $999 and came with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. This represented a small discount in price compared to previous iterations of this laptop. How the Intel model will fit into this pricing scheme, however, should be interesting, especially if it ends up costing more.