Microsoft’s New Surface Laptops Embody the PC-Phone Marriage Snapdragon Promised Years Ago
On the stage for the second day of keynotes at Snapdragon Summit 2026, Microsoft Corporate VP of Surface Devices Brett Ostrum revealed new versions of the company’s 12-inch Surface Pro and 13-inch Surface laptops, both of which now run Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite X2 chips for improved performance and battery life. These chips had come to larger Surface devices earlier in the year, and arrived in the smaller sizes of Microsoft’s portable PC lineup.
Along with the chip upgrade, both of the updated Surface devices have increased RAM options of 16GB and 24GB (up from 8GB and 16GB in their predecessors).
But some hidden advantages of running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite X2, which was introduced at last year’s Snapdragon Summit, are downstream of the years the company spent developing smartphone silicon.
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The first Snapdragon X Elite chips were revealed in 2023 as Qualcomm’s big return to PC silicon, attempting to outdo Apple laptops in battery life and performance. A big part of the company’s pitch was using what it learned making phone chips to see benefits in the laptop space. Now, we’re seeing evidence of that DNA paying off.
For instance, Ostrum told me after the keynote that the new Surface devices have superior cameras to their rivals thanks to the image signal processing on the Elite X2 chips, inherited from phone camera hardware, that will make you look amazing on Zoom calls.
Before, Apple had taken the crown of image quality in its laptop webcams, Ostrum said. But thanks to Qualcomm’s investment in ISP and the camera pipeline, the Surface devices have seen a big turnaround in the video quality captured by their webcams.
“With our [Surface] Pro and laptops that we announced earlier this year [with] Snapdragon X2 Elite, we took the No. 1 and No. 2 spots from Apple in terms of camera quality,” Ostrum said, referring to DxOMark’s laptop rankings. Those rankings currently place Microsoft’s 13.8-inch Surface Laptop and 13-inch Surface Pro in first and second place, above Apple’s MacBook Pro models, in camera quality.
It’s not the first thing consumers or commercial buyers look at when shopping for laptops and two-in-ones, but people now spend so much time in Teams and Zoom meetings that camera quality is more important than consumers might admit. And considering how much the bar has been raised by ever-improving phone cameras, it’s no surprise that people want and expect an improved webcam.
“You want to look good when you show up [on camera], and it’s important to us, it’s important to our customers. And so it’s a fairly straightforward approach for us to say we want to make this look as good as we can,” Ostrum said.
We’re not just talking about better camera hardware, either. Ostrum was quick to say that it isn’t the lenses or sensors that make the difference — it’s the image processing pipeline Qualcomm has refined.
“I can put the same sensors into multiple silicon platforms, but the best solution is going to come with a Qualcomm ISP,” Ostrum said. “If you compare an Intel-based one of our commercial devices to a Qualcomm-based solution, you will see the difference.”
Phone chip DNA doesn’t just help with cameras — it boosts battery, too
That’s not the end of smartphones’ influence on laptops. The older x86 chips may have been adapted to laptops, but they originated in a world where PCs plugged into walls, Ostrum said, implying that they struggled with battery life. But the Snapdragon phone chip DNA and its emphasis on performance per watt have noticeably extended the battery life on Surface devices while also delivering the fast speeds consumers need for their tasks.
“People raved about the first generation of devices from a performance perspective, but the thing that we heard unanimously that was just a huge delight was, ‘The battery life’s incredible. The battery life’s incredible. The battery life’s incredible,'” Ostrum said.
There’s more that goes into the battery life of the Surface Pro and Surface laptop than the chip, including redesigning the interior for better thermal management. Roughly speaking, better heat management means more time running at high performance and less energy spent cooling the device down, which means more battery life. It’s all connected.
“We oftentimes will see as much gen-over-gen performance improvement from the thermal design that we iterate on as we do from the chip improvement gen-over-gen,” Ostrum said.
Still, that’s combining what Microsoft does best with the advantages of Qualcomm silicon, at least as far as Ostrum sees it. Microsoft expects 22.5 hours of battery life from the second-gen 13-inch Surface laptop, which is slightly down from the 24 hours offered by its predecessor. We’ll see how those expectations bear out in our testing.
What is true is how much longer those expectations are than what they were before Microsoft switched to Qualcomm — the Surface Laptop 5 and 6 with Intel-based chips had 18.5 hours of expected battery life, though the internet is strewn with reports of units only lasting half that time, or even less. Switching to a chip that inherited priorities and design architecture from mobile silicon seems to have helped.
Editors’ note: David Lumb’s travel costs were covered by Qualcomm. The judgments and opinions of CNET are our own.
Managing Editor, Mobile
David Lumb is a managing editor for the mobile team, covering mobile and gaming spaces. Before CNET, he covered tech, gaming, and culture for TechRadar, Engadget, Popular Mechanics, NBC Asian America, Increment, Fast Company and others. As a true Californian, he lives for coffee, beaches and burritos. See full bio
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