Last week was a biggie for those of you into tech conferences. First and foremost, of course, there was the 2025 iteration of the Silicon Valley-located Embedded Vision Summit, for which I have both personal interest and professional association. In parallel (and in Taiwan), a “little” computer conference called Computex was going on. And from a single-company-sponsored event standpoint, there were two dueling ones: Google with I/O in Mountain View, CA, which I’ll cover in my next post, and Microsoft, with Build in Seattle, WA, which I’ll detail today.
2024 launches
To begin, however, I’ll rewind two weeks further in the past. Revising my previous year’s (2024) Build coverage, you’ll note as I did at the time that this was the first time Microsoft launched new generations of the consumer-tailored versions of its various Surface family mobile computer products that exclusively leveraged Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Arm-based SoCs.
And equally, if not more notable, last year was also the first time Microsoft added Arm-based variants to its “For Business” Surface product portfolio:
2025 launches
Fast forward to early May 2025 and, for some unknown reason, Microsoft decided to decouple its new-hardware unveilings from the main Build event, releasing the earlier announcements on May 6. Once again there were Arm-only Surface systems for consumer:
and business users:
Although this time, there weren’t any full-generation upticks. Instead, portfolio expansion and cost reduction (the latter aided by broader product line tweaks, albeit tempered by looming tariff-induced potential price increases) came to the fore. The Surface Pro is now available in both legacy 13” and new 12” form factors, while the Surface Laptop now comes in both legacy 13.8” and 15” and a new 13” size. Both newcomers are more svelte than their precursors: 0.61” versus 0.69” and 2.7 lbs. versus 2.96 lbs. for the Surface Laptop, and 0.30” vs 0.37” and 1.5 lbs. vs 1.96 lbs. (in both cases absent the optional keyboard case) for the Surface Pro.
The Surface Laptop’s hardware
I’d argue that the Surface Laptop’s form factor evolution is the more critical of the two from a competitive standpoint, an opinion which factors more generally into the fundamental reason why I’m devoting so much of today’s writeup to hardware. x86-based systems increasingly seem to me to be an afterthought for Microsoft, despite the fact that AMD and Intel have belatedly caught up with Qualcomm from a neural processor core performance standpoint and thereby gained the right to put the Copilot+ marketing moniker on systems containing their CPUs, too. Why is Microsoft becoming increasingly Arm-centric? Because I’d hypothesize, Microsoft is also becoming increasingly Apple-fixated, as the latter company’s half-decade-back announced transition from x86 to Arm-based Apple Silicon systems bears increasingly bountiful fruit.
The new 13” Surface Laptop pretty clearly has Apple’s MacBook Air in its sights, although whether it’ll actually hit its target (and if so, whether mortally or resulting only in a flesh wound) is less clear. For one thing, it’s based on the 8-core variant of the Snapdragon X Plus, versus the 10-core “Plus” and 12-core “Elite” SoCs found in the slightly larger system (that said, all Snapdragon X variants deliver the same level of NPU performance). The SSD is (slower) UFS in interface, versus NVMe, and tops out at 512 GBytes of capacity. There’s only one DRAM option offered: 16 GBytes. And although the display is only slightly smaller, its image quality specs are more notably diminished: 1920×1280 pixels at 60 Hz versus 2304×1536 pixels at 120 Hz.
The Surface Pro’s hardware
The 12” Surface Pro is similarly processor core count, mass storage capacity, and system memory size-encumbered, as is its display, albeit not as badly: IPS-based with 2196×1464 pixels at 90 Hz versus either IPS- or OLED-based 2880×1920 pixels at 120 Hz. That said, I concur with Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham; the return of the first few Surface Pro generations’ flimsy keyboard is baffling, especially when it had just been further reinforced with last year’s offering. Both new systems drop the proprietary Surface Connect port in favor of USB-C, curiously dispensing with MagSafe-like magnetic-connector charging capabilities in the process (I’m guessing the European Union might have had a little something to do with that decision).
Big picture, Microsoft is seemingly increasingly confident in Windows 11 Arm64’s Prism x86 code virtualization foundation’s robustness. Nobody (including me, repeatedly) was realistically saying so just a few years ago, but by focusing development attention on 64-bit- and Windows 11-only emulation, the Prism team has made tangible progress since then. I’ve got three Windows 11 Arm64-based systems here, and rarely do I encounter a glitch anymore (that said, I’m not a gamer). Further improving the situation, not only from inherent compatibility but also performance and power consumption standpoints, is the increasing prevalence of Arm64-native application variants (such as Dropbox: yay!). And the “dark cloud” of looming lawsuits between Arm and Qualcomm that I’d mentioned a year ago, thankfully, also dissipated a few months back.
AI-related announcements
Early May wasn’t all about hardware for Microsoft. The company also unveiled a raft of Copilot+-only new and expanded capabilities for Windows 11. And two weeks later, this trend extended even more broadly into Microsoft’s operating system and applications with numerous AI-related announcements at Build. Examples included:
- Web app “hooks” via the Edge browser into on-device deep learning models
- Open-source model support via another set of “hooks”, Windows AI Foundry and its local inference runtime, Windows ML
- Embrace of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), initially unveiled by Anthropic, enabling developers’ AI apps and agents to talk to other apps, web services…even Windows itself
- An AI coding agent offered by Microsoft-owned GitHub
- And even AI “actions” built into File Explorer
Microsoft also revealed a new command-line text editor, an open-source transition for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and encryption algorithm enhancements, for example. That said, much of the rest of the keynote (at least; I wasn’t there so can’t speak to the training sessions), was rife with AI technobabble, IMHO, from both Microsoft execs and invited notable guests, complete with innumerable mentions of the “agentic web” and other trendy lingo.
Watch it yourself, or not
See below if you’re up for a slog through the entire 2 hours of oft-tedium:
Conversely, if a 15-minute summary is more to your liking, here’s The Verge’s take:
And with that, having just passed 1,000 words, I won’t force you to slog through any more of my technobabble 
As always, I’ll end with an invitation to share your thoughts in the comments!
—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.
Related Content
- Microsoft’s Build 2024: Silicon and associated systems come to the fore
- Apple on Arm: How did we get here?
- Apple’s spring 2025 part II: Computers, tablets, and a new chip, too
- Microsoft’s Build 2024: Silicon and associated systems come to the fore
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