10-Day Review of Surface Laptop 7

Hey. I've edited the review a bit. I'm always super-critical of products at first. As for Windows updates, I waited to setup speech until all that was done for several hours. NVDA doesn't actually lag at all. It's very responsive; just barely-perceptably less responsive than my AMD u-series mini desktop processor--which, again, is a laptop processor with 6 cores.
So far, my battery was at 98% after sleeping overnight, but now is at 89% with about an hour of usage. The system tray estimates 14 hours of life remaining. That's with all the battery optimizations. Still plenty good.

Regarding the power button, tap is standard Windows behavior set in "Change What The Power Buttons Do." Default is sleep. You can set it separately for battery and plugged in. I set mine to "do nothing" to avoid calamities. The three-second and 10-second behaviors still work, since that's at a lower level.

I think somebody asked about fans. The fan hasn't kicked on once, and I'd think all of that yesterday would have been a stress test. It got warm but nothing to write home about.

Regarding battery life, keep in mind that the 20-hour claim is for local video playback. Wi-fi adaptors drain the battery much more, and they claim only 12 hours on their continuous web browsing test, which is better than virtually all but not all Windows laptops.
Although I was fixated on battery life as well, I decided that it will be what it is. I've loved the Macbook battery life, but really only because I find it perversely fun to not charge it for like a week and leave it around anyplace so that I constantly have to ask Siri to find it. It's usually slipped down out of sight in the sofa or i left it on the porch. I have no reason not to charge it daily like my phone.
What I'm really watching out for is any impact from the fact that every single instruction by NVDA has to be translated into ARM instructions by Prism, which has to take at least a small toll. On the other hand, NVDA was already running through the Windows-On-Windows translator in order to run on 64-bit Windows, because it's a 32-bit app. They don't have the bandwidth to port it. Hopefully, it's not being double-emulated! I'll try working a couple of hours in Word using NVDA then switch to Narrator for a couple of hours as a casual test.
It's gone down 2% as I wrote this. So, yeah, definitely not out of the park relative to other laptops I've owned. I have no idea how Jessica from the other thread is getting 20 hours, except perhaps the fact that she's coding, which is probably all local, whereas I'm online talking to y'all. Even MS Word is online constantly updating to OneDrive.
I actually wanted to wait for the rumored smaller "X" model coming later this year or the X2 hypothetical Surface Laptop 8, supposedly by year's end. But my Ulysses stopped saving to iCloud and their tech support always just throws up their hands and says "golly, we don't know" whenever I have a problem. They say they're moving away from iCloud, but that doesn't help me right now, so it forced my already poised hand. Then, too, I'm seeing laptop prices going up because of you-know-what.

@ brad: you can Google prism and windows on arm for more info. All applications not written specifically for arm go through the prism translator. A lot of people call it an emulator, but that's not what it is. You can also look up windows on windows 64 for my other comment.
I kind of wish I had never mentioned lag. It really doesn't at all. It's really smooth, both with one core and eloquence. It just didn't give me that wow factor I have on my AMD processor. A couple of times initially it paused for like a second when doing something potentially intensive. But I haven't had that happen again yet.
As for installing windows, I just missed a step and it didn't give me a moment to go back. i'm pretty sure the set up as new PC option was buried under a "more options" link, which seems like a dark pattern, if I'm correct about that and didn't just failed to notice the correct option. User error. but definitely don't restore from a back up! It may have run into more problems because it was moving from X 86 to arm. What's more, none of my settings in word, edge, or anything else were even transferred!
I'll come back in a week with more solid notes on battery. My experience is in line with a lot of other users you can Google. There's even been speculation that some batteries are just lemons. See y'all in a week.

FYI, I've also updated my initial review. I've never been able to be concise to save my life, so I've added headings below if you want to skim. Don't forget, I'm just one guy with one computer. One very obsessive geeky guy.

NVDA on ARM

I've already described the Start menu bug regarding the search field and arrowing up from there. The pinned apps, etc., work as well as they ever have. I had additional problems, particularly with Narrator, with the widget pane, until I Googled a PowerShell command to completely uninstall the widgets package. Widgets have been the ruin of many a poor screen reader. There are other quirks harder to put my finger on right now. There are always quirks, though.

The other question was NVDA's battery impact with Prism, but I can't directly answer it. I have no way to separate the two. Prism doesn't show up in the battery usage statistics or task manager in any recognizable way. All I can do is compare it to Narrator on similar tasks. NVDA does appear to consume significantly more power than Narrator, as I'll show below. Does that hold true on x86 as well, though? I'd also be surprised if JAWS were much better, despite being compiled for ARM, because it's JAWS.

The best way I know to compare my subjective impressions of screen readers across platforms is to, on a scale of 1 to 10, rate them in terms of how confident I am that they will not mess up. NVDA gets a 9 on AMD and 6 on ARM. Narrator is a 1 both ways, bless its heart. I gave it a wad of gold star stickers to quell its tears. In the interest of context, without wanting to open the door to one of those you-know-what threads, I give VoiceOver on Mac a 3 and a 9 on IOS.

Battery life

I ran the battery down three times, keeping notes on the battery meter and what I was doing every hour or less. I made sure Windows and search indexing were up to date. I was never more than 20 feet from the router. Energy saver was set not to come on until 20%, because cloud syncing is important to me. I always have display brightness as low as it will go, but who knows how many nits that is. Keep in mind, too, that speakers require power, and we have those going all the time, unlike most users, so that at least in part balances out the lower brightness. The first two runs were almost continual browsing tests with lots of streaming, plus lots of monkeying with settings and some restarts, which I wouldn't do on battery in real life. Sleep accounted for 3% each night, whether that meant 10 hours or 18; and it slept an additional 20 hours or so each run when I wasn't using it. I think entering and resuming from sleep requires most of the energy, regardless of how long it's out.

First run: This one goes to 11.

That's what I got using NVDA and a OneCore voice. With the settings app, notepad, Word, and a browser tab open, the typical battery drain was 7.5% per hour, with a couple of spikes to 10%. It drained 6% per hour when running nothing but Notepad plus browsing in one tab, even when that meant streaming YouTube or streaming a radio station in the Apple Music app--which is, ah-hem, very usable on Windows. As it turns out, according to the battery usage panel, Notepad with autosave turned on is not an insignificant power drain. So, it counts as an app.

Second run: More than 15 hours

Regrettably, this run used Narrator throughout. The per-app battery usage stats in settings are tricky to interpret, since it's essentially a pie chart. So, if nothing but the screen reader were running, it would show extremely high usage. The more going on, the smaller the number. I tried to generate roughly the same load on both runs, but it's obviously not precise. On each day of this run, Narrator's battery usage was 5% of the total, as opposed to 8 times that for a browser, whether Chrome or Edge. During runs 1 and 3, NVDA was responsible for 7% of usage. I couldn't make it drain more than 7% in an hour no matter what I did, even when I opened 4 heinous web sites in separate tabs plus Applevis plus streamed YouTube, but that turned out to be the same for NVDA on run 3. Snapdragon eats this test for breakfast. If that held true all the way down--and who among us hasn't spent an entire day browsing their way to unconsciousness--that would yield up to 14 hours, which is in line with Microsoft's own ideal web browsing claim. Interestingly, NVDA consistently drained 1% more per hour than Narrator during lighter loads. Snapdragon is designed for performance: the lighter the load, the less those advantages come into play. That extra 1% would amount to a couple of hours over the run, which is what happened. The Narrator "natural voices" aren't light weight, either. I checked the performance monitor to see if they were using the NPU, but it reported 0% usage. I also wonder if the OneCore voices are themselves compiled for ARM. Like I said, Narrator can download and list them but won't speak using them. Narrator hit the start menu bug as well, but only once. I think I deserve a prize for enduring Narrator this long, like maybe free therapy to help me recover.

Third run: 13 hours

Back to NVDA, with slightly less of a load, though still more than my norm. When I forced the display to sstay on and set NVDA to reading the book-length Word document I was supposed to have been working on all week, the drain was 6% per hour for four hours.

Ruminations on battery life and Snapdragon

Judging from user experiences and the more reputable reviews of various machines, this is unexceptional longevity for 2024-model laptops, whether Snapdragon or Intel Meteor Lake. For example, users seem to be getting 12 or more hours out of the Inspiron 14 Plus with Meteor Lake, which has fan noise and mediocre build quality, but starting at half the price. For the price of the Surface, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura, 14-inch, has Lunar Lake, good build, little fan noise, and generally high but not universal praise for sound. Some tests show 23 hours mixed use for it, while others far less. I don't consider Asus laptops because reviews have all panned their keyboards, but they supposedly often have great battery life. The X Elite lasts longer than the Plus, because more cores on the same die means better efficiency; while the larger batteries in 15-inch computers also typically last longer despite their larger displays. One Surface Laptop 7 owner on Reddit complained he was only getting 6 hours with Figma and 10 tabs open. I'm not a doctor or anything, but that guy really ought to close some of those tabs before he hurts himself.

The major culprit holding back better results is likely the fact that all 10 processor cores are identical, with no dedicated efficiency cores. This makes for great multithreaded performance benchmarks in reviews, but does absolutely nothing in productivity apps except suck down juice through a jumbo-sized straw. Qualcomm pointedly avoids any mention of single-core performance, which trails Meteor Lake. They tout that Snapdragon is a third more efficient per watt than Meteor Lake at peak performance, but checks of my resource monitor never showed the processor at more than 17% capacity and only 10% when I wasn't trying to push things. Furthermore, only 3 cores showed significant activity of up to 45%. The others were just standing around watching. Bouncing to my AMD computer with a 2021 Rhizome 5 5560u 6-core processor, the same 6-tab plus streaming web test showed 26% processor use, then back down to 10% for just hanging out. The upcoming Snapdragon X2 platform boasts 18 cores, but I can't imagine that changing the efficiency picture significantly on office productivity tasks. Lunar Lake is meanwhile the undisputed king of efficiency, but Intel has stated there won't be another generation that pulls this off. They matched ARM by similarly integrating the memory into the same unit as the processors, which was cost prohibitive. R.I.P., Moore's Law. AMD AI300-based laptops are starting to appear, though AMD has historically focused on gaming-grade performance over efficiency. Except for my own experiences, all of the above comes from reputable sources and discussion boards, of course. All in all, I'm not sure there's a clear milestone to wait for in the near term.

In a sense, anything beyond "all day battery life" is nothing but a number, just as performance numbers cease to matter once the user experience becomes smooth. Because I do not live in either an airport or cow pasture... yet... I'm normally on battery maybe 4 or 5 hours a day. Running it down in two days has been as exhausting for me as the computer. However, extra battery capacity is what staves off the moment when the laptop becomes a desktop. My 4-year-old MBA got more than the advertised 18 ours when new, and still goes considerably more than 12 hours, with the battery health reporting max capacity at 85%. Its standby time is roughly infinity.

For myself, I'm on the fence. I belatedly came up with a suboptimal way to get my Mac's Ulysses docs back into the cloud. So, I'm going to see how it goes with the Surface for a couple of weeks to decide. Battery life wouldn't be the reason I return it. If it hangs again on me, that'll be the reason. If not, it'll be the really annoying F-Lock key issue, which is not ever going entirely away. I actually was in the checkout process with the Yoga Slim 7i when I decided to read one more review of it and found the gotcha. There's always a gotcha. Blind people may be the only users who can actually use their laptops in their laps comfortably, and that's what I normally do. The Yoga's air intake vents and woofers are on the bottom. My old HP had the same arrangement, and it was really bad news.

For me, what I was calling a system hang was the most worrying issue. It occurred to me this morning that, when I was typing, it might have been a momentary pop-up of some kind and/or NVDA losing UIA object focus. Losing focus is definitely an issue in Chrome once in a while, and I thought that was another freeze. Turned out, I can alt-tab away and back. The exact same problem was present for a long time on x86, and I never considered it more than an inconvenience.
Narrator also has started spontaneously being able to use some but not all One Core and SAPI Voices. It happened after I plugged in and Windows was able to install an update.
The keyboard does seem to have loosened up, or else I've tightened up. Lost keystrokes have been much less of a problem the last couple of days.
Finally, I probably should have noted that the start menu bug isn't a big deal, since that search box has always been an inferior experience to using the ones in Settings, File Explorer, and Google. I was using it to launch settings, which you can do faster with Win+i, and to launch apps not pinned to the start menu, which I have now pinned.
But overall, yeah, the Macbook hardware overthrow has not yet happened and might not for a while in terms of battery and OS optimization. Build quality and typing experience are, however, superior on the Surface IMO. The two things it loses on, Lunar Lake has, but with at least minor build compromises and minor fan use, or so I've read. Give that Yoga Slim 7i serious thought if you're not a lap user. There's always something jangly about Windows driver issues on typical Windows computers, of course, that I don't expect to happen with an integrated Qualcomm system-on-chip.
I've been using Eloquence the past couple of days and just love the experience of using this laptop, except when I hit the Fn key, which has for me earned an apostrophe (I hope I can still say that on Applevis). That key so far is this particular computer's gotcha.
Still evaluating, but you get the idea.
Peace and love, everybody. Glad I could help.