According to a new report, the newly revised model of Microsoft’s Surface line of laptops can barely handle basic, essential operations such as having multiple tabs open, live video streaming, and even using Google Docs—and both Windows 11’s poor optimization and the AI data center–induced RAM shortages, which Microsoft is partly at fault for, are to blame.
Said report comes via The Verge’s Antonio G. Di Benedetto, who recently reviewed the cheapest retail version of Microsoft’s latest model of 13-inch Surface Laptops. However, to fully put Antonio’s review into context, it’s important to explain that the newly revised model in question barely differs from the previous version that The Verge reviewed last year. So what’s the main difference between the 2025 version of the 13-inch Surface Laptop, which, at the time, retailed for $900, and the 2026 revision of the same model, which sells for $950? 8GB of RAM.
In an attempt to continue offering a budget version of its Surface Laptop range, Microsoft reduced the RAM in the cheapest 13-inch Surface Laptop from 16GB to 8GB. If you want an extra 8GB, that’ll set you back an extra $200. OK, but how bad could the 8GB version really be? According to Antonio, who previously published a glowing review of the 2025 model of the cheapest version of 13-inch Surface Laptops (which, again, came with 16GB of RAM as standard), quite bad.
“I was on a Microsoft Teams call (using the app, not a browser) when the host streamed a brief video, which made the whole laptop hang for several seconds,” stated Antonio. “At the time, I had about 10 Chrome tabs open across two desktops, alongside Slack and Signal — not an obscene level of multitasking. And we didn’t even have our webcams on.”
“The Surface Laptop would hang for a few seconds like this several times a day, even when I thought I wasn’t pushing it too hard,” he continued. “I’ve had these temporary freezes while just working in some Google Docs — no Teams call running or anything streaming in the background.”
So what exactly is the culprit of all this freezing and stuttering? Antonio stated that after “a fresh reboot with bare minimum startup apps running,” Task Manager displayed that the 8GB Surface Laptop was “using 4.2GB of RAM.” If you’re curious why that’s important, it’s almost exactly the amount of RAM required to run Windows 11.
And the worst part is, Windows 11’s poor optimization is only half to blame for this. One of the reasons why RAM is so bloody expensive is due to all the data centers being built, something Microsoft itself is heavily invested in. Microsoft has announced, and this is no exaggeration, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments into building AI data centers. Said investments also don’t include the other hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested into helping build the likes of OpenAI and Copilot.
But hey, I suppose they managed to save a few bucks by firing thousands of Xbox employees and gutting a bunch of studios earlier this month. Maybe with those savings they can produce even worse, more expensive versions of hardware that nobody can afford anyway.
