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Microsoft’s Surface hardware isn’t exactly popular, and things have only gotten worse since the company stopped experimenting with new form factors. But that doesn’t mean Surface isn’t winning in other areas. According to Microsoft, the two new Surface PCs are beating Apple in camera quality.
In a podcast, Microsoft’s Surface boss confirmed that the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro now hold the #1 and #2 spots in DxOMark’s laptop camera quality rankings.
For those unaware, DxOMark is an independent lab that tests cameras found in laptops and maintains a frequently updated ranking.
I verified the claims, and DxOMark’s data indeed confirms that Microsoft is killing it with its new Surface PCs. The benchmark is actually quite interesting if you pay attention to the numbers:
The list was entirely dominated by MacBooks until Microsoft stepped up its game. Now, we have the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop in first place with a camera score of 146, followed by the 13-inch Surface Pro with 144 points. The 14-inch MacBook Pro has dropped to third place, while the M5 model is in fourth place with a score of 135.
The Surface Laptop is ten points ahead of Apple’s highest-ranked MacBook, but the overall winner is still Apple’s ecosystem.
Apple has the most laptops dominating laptop camera quality benchmarks
While Microsoft is doing a great job, its partners are yet to catch up. In the list of the top ten PCs, Apple has five products, Microsoft has three, including a Surface Laptop from 2025, while Lenovo has two ThinkPads. What about other OEMs? They’re lagging far behind, but given Microsoft’s push, I wouldn’t be surprised if others also start catching up.
Historically, Microsoft Surface has set the standard for Windows PCs, and OEMs have followed. It wasn’t until Microsoft made the Surface Pro that Lenovo started pushing Yoga laptops.
Brett Ostrum, who leads Surface at Microsoft, also said the new Surface devices deliver 35% better GPU performance than the MacBook Air M5 and 60% better performance on battery compared to the previous generation:
However, camera and GPU benchmarks do not tell the full story. Microsoft still needs to improve the base configuration of these devices, particularly when it comes to RAM.
Microsoft still has an 8GB RAM problem to solve
Surface may be doing better than MacBook in this camera benchmark, but Microsoft still needs to improve its base offering. The entry-level Surface Pro 2026 comes with a Snapdragon X Plus chip, 8GB of RAM, and just 256GB of storage.
That’s difficult to justify on a Windows PC in 2026. Microsoft had largely stopped selling or recommending PCs with 8GB of RAM after the Copilot+ PC campaign kicked off, as the platform required at least 16GB of RAM.
Interestingly, Microsoft no longer says 16GB of RAM is a must, and the shift in its language is largely driven by memory prices reaching an all-time high.
Sometimes, the company also suggested 32GB RAM is recommended for gamers, but we’re no longer seeing the same language. Microsoft has also removed documents that pitched 32GB of RAM as a recommendation.
Contrary to what it previously said, the company now argues that 8GB of RAM is good enough for everyday use cases such as browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps.
While 8GB of RAM sounds fine on paper, and it’s quite decent on macOS, you can’t say the same for Windows. Windows 11 still has a RAM problem, with apps such as Teams using up to 1GB of memory. It only gets worse when you open other apps such as New Outlook, which can consume several gigabytes of RAM and take up to ten seconds to open an email.
The good news is that Microsoft has promised to reduce RAM usage in Windows 11 as memory prices continue to rise, and we’ll begin seeing memory-management improvements in the coming weeks.
Even then, I still recommend opting for 16GB of RAM. A PC is a long-term investment, and you shouldn’t settle for anything less.
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[[{“value”:”Microsoft’s Surface hardware isn’t exactly popular, and things have only gotten worse since the company stopped experimenting with new form factors. But that doesn’t mean Surface isn’t winning in other areas. According to Microsoft, the two new Surface PCs are beating Apple in camera quality. In a podcast, Microsoft’s Surface boss confirmed that the Surface
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