Are you looking for a new Windows laptop to get some work done from your local coffee shop? You can pick up the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop from Best Buy for $1,110, a $400 break from the usual $1,500 price tag. It’s our favorite Windows laptop for non-gamers, and it sports smooth performance and great battery life.
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Photograph: Brenda Stolyar
Microsoft
Surface Laptop (7th Edition, 2024)
There are big improvements to the screen for this generation, with thinner bezels that give you more real estate without expanding the footprint. Even if you won’t be doing much gaming, the 120-Hz refresh rate will help daily tasks feel buttery smooth, and it’s bright enough to get some work done, even while you’re sitting outside. It’s a touchscreen as well, although Windows isn’t the most touch-friendly operating system.
It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, an ARM processor that’s smooth for everyday computing, and has impressive battery life. After using the laptop for most of the work day at 50 percent brightness, our reviewer Brenda Stolyar still had over 20 percent of the battery left. The discounted model has 16 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage, a typical configuration for laptops at this price point. It also has the ports you’d expect for a mid-tier laptop, including two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, plus a single USB-A port just in case, a 3.5-mm headphone jack, and the magnetic Surface Connect charging port.
While the Surface Laptop is Copilot-enabled, we haven’t found the suite of AI tools all that compelling or useful. There’s a dedicated key for accessing the Copilot chat bot, as well as live captioning for videos, and CoCreator lets you draw in Paint and then prompt it to generate an AI image. The most potentially useful feature is Recall, which takes regular screenshots to act as a checkable history of your activity, but the privacy implications there aren’t very appealing.
If you’re interested in jumping on this deal, you can find the 15-inch Surface Laptop for $1,100 at Best Buy in either black or platinum. We also keep a list of our favorite laptops updated with the latest and greatest laptops for both Windows and MacOS, and even gaming picks if that’s more your speed.
