Microsoft's tiny new Surface Laptop and Pro shrink in other ways, too

Microsoft isn't talking tariffs, but you can feel the effects anyway.

- BY MARK HACHMAN

Smaller Surfaces have finally arrived. Microsoft is announcing smaller, less powerful revisions of the Microsoft Surface Pro tablet and Surface Laptop, all built around a more conservative version of Qualcomm’s battery-sipping Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip.

Smaller doesn’t necessarily mean dramatically cheaper, however. And while earlier reports (fave.co/3EKWO94) said Microsoft would ship both devices with 12-inch screens, that’s not quite what we're getting.

The new $899 13-inch Surface Laptop is very similar to the existing 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 (fave.co/3X7OXJ5), which actually ships for as low as $999.99 with a Snapdragon X Plus chip inside. Meanwhile, the smaller 12-inch Surface Pro will cost as little as $799.99, below the $999.99 Microsoft charges for its existing 13-inch Surface Pro 11 (fave.co/3YPPm3T) with a Snapdragon X Plus inside. As you'll see below, you're getting a lot less.

What's new? The smaller sizes, of course, plus new colorways like Ocean and Violet, and a special Slate color for the Surface Pro. The Pro features yet another redesigned keyboard, while the Laptop's chief selling point is a 16-hour battery life (23 hours for video playback) that Microsoft says is its longest yet. Microsoft is also using these Copilot+ PCs and the X Plus chip's 45 TOPS as showcases for AI technologies like Recall, Click to Do, and its improved semantic search capabilities, while promising even new AI-powered features for the future—like agentic AI (fave.co/3GEisMO).

Microsoft is also waving goodbye to the Surface Connect port (fave.co/4d6vGOx), the iconic magnetic power connector that defined Surfaces for a decade. Now, Surface is using USB-C ports only for charging and expansion, though there's an extra USB-A port on the Laptop for legacy connections.