The new Snapdragon X Plus-powered Surface Laptop 7th Edition was compared with the M2-powered Apple MacBook Air by YouTube creator Luke Miani. He used Cinebench to measure the CPU capability of the machines and the results are somewhat shocking. However, in some areas, the M2 MacBook Air still performed better than the Surface Laptop. So let’s take a look.
Battery life and performance
Luke Miani ran Cinebench twice, 10 minutes each time, for a total of 20 minutes. The test shows that the power efficiency of Apple Silicon is still superior to Qualcomm’s new offering. When the M2 MacBook Air lost 10% of its battery during testing, the Snapdragon X Plus-powered Surface Laptop 7th Edition was already down to 65%.
Speaking of the battery capacity, there is not much of a difference between the two machines. The M2 MacBook Air is equipped with a 52Wh battery, while the Surface Laptop 7th Edition is equipped with a 54Wh battery. So the result we saw was due to the significantly higher power consumption of the Snapdragon X Plus during the testing. On the other side, the keyboard area of the Surface Laptop reached 45°C while the MacBook Air was at 36°C. You should also keep in mind that the Surface Laptop has an active cooling mechanism.
However, in Cinebench, the Surface Laptop also achieved a significantly higher score as compared to the M2 MacBook Air. It even outperformed the M3 MacBook Air in the test. Nonetheless, the Snapdragon SoC is still new and needs some work in different aspects. You can see the results below (lower is better).
While the Cinebench test highlighted the power efficiency difference between the two chips, the Surface Laptop performed relatively better in normal video streaming when it comes to battery life. With a total of 7.5 hours of video playback the MacBook Air reached 36% while the Surface Laptop was at 12%.
