Laptop battery life is changing for the better, and it’s not just the laptop batteries that support the benefits.
Depending on how old you are, you might recall the days of barely hitting four or five hours without reaching for the charging cable, which these days seems low for laptops.
Today, a laptop can last between 8 and 12 hours, essentially making it an all day laptop, complete with decent performance included. The next laptops will do even more, and it may not be the battery alone that’s giving it the juice. It could be the processor.
Intel’s latest hardware boasts some serious gains in the PC world, but so does mobile chip specialist Qualcomm, which for the past couple of years has been stretching out into Windows PCs, and showing consumers what its tech can do. We’ve seen it in models from Dell and also from HP, and even last year’s Surface saw the tech, too.
This year, Surface is getting a new variation, as the Snapdragon X2 makes its way to the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, styles of the Surface design we’ve seen time and time again, but with new hardware at the centre.
If you’ve seen Microsoft’s kickstand-equipped Surface Pro before, the 2026 Surface Pro 13 inch doesn’t change the design, but does bring with new hardware. The latest Snapdragon X2 chip is there, as is support for an optional OLED touchscreen, essentially supporting faster hardware with as much as 15 hours of battery life from the system.
You’ll still need to get an optional Surface Pro keyboard, but that’s largely part and parcel with the Surface Pro design.
The 2026 Surface Pro is only coming in a 13 inch laptop, but if you need a little more size, the 2026 Surface Laptop will come in two: 13.8 inch and 15 inch options.
Built to be more of a laptop, but still coming with the touchscreen, the Surface Laptop gets the X2 chip, as well, though the screen quality gets sharper in that bigger model, while both see performance gains from the new hardware.
They’ll both win on battery life, too, with as much as 20 hours of battery from the 13.8 inch Surface Laptop, and up to 19 on the 15 inch.
One thing that is missing in action from the Surface line-up so far, and that’s the “Ultra” model shown at Computex recently.
A variation on the theme, the Surface Laptop Ultra is a more premium variation with a custom Nvidia processor designed for the AI generation, essentially epitomising the concept of what an AI PC could be. It even reportedly features the ability to replace parts such as the solid-state drive.
The release of this Surface Laptop Ultra doesn’t appear to be quite on the cards yet, with Microsoft’s Surface launch in mid-June more about upgrading the common Surface models, and making them available for everyone else who doesn’t need a specifically AI-focused laptop like the Surface Ultra.
Officially the new Surface models look to launch shortly, priced from $2699 for the Surface Pro, or from $2799 for the Surface Laptop.
