MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo A2VM review: This tiny 2-in-1 business laptop delivers peak battery life

Finding the perfect business laptop isn't always up to us as employees; we are often just presented with a laptop from the company's IT department. But if you are in the market for a professional-grade laptop for your own small business or you hold sway over the laptop purchasing decision at your company, you need to consider a number of factors, from security and build quality to warranty, performance, and battery life.

MSI’s Summit 13 AI+ Evo is an AI PC business laptop, and it offers plenty to fulfill your needs. Solid Intel Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake” performance and strong battery life are complemented by sturdy convertible hinges and a bright, vivid display. However, the Summit 13 also suffers from a smudge-magnet plastic chassis, a cramped keyboard, and poor audio quality.

So, can the MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo climb to the top for a spot on our best AI PCs list? Or perhaps our best business laptops page? Let’s find out.

Laptop: Specs and benchmarks

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Price and configurations

MSI launched only two configurations of the Summit 13 AI+ Evo (A2VM). It starts at $1,499 and features an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics and Intel AI Boost NPU with up to 47 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of AI performance. This is a solid starting spec, offering a good balance of power and battery life at a reasonable price for an enterprise laptop.

The starting configuration also features 32GB of RAM soldered onto the CPU package, so it isn’t upgradeable but should be more than enough for most working professionals. The Summit 13 AI+ Evo starting configuration also features a 1TB SSD for storage and a 13.3-inch, 1920 x 1200, 60Hz IPS touchscreen display. You can upgrade the storage to a 2TB SSD for an additional $100, bringing the price to $1,599. That’s the configuration I reviewed.

Both configurations also include the MSI Pen2.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Design

The Summit 13 AI+ Evo straddles the line between a premium consumer 2-in-1 and a business laptop, and its design reflects that. It sports a slick Ink Black chassis and copper detailing around the edges of the screen, keyboard deck, and touchpad. The copper details are reminiscent of the old HP Spectre x360 chassis that featured subtle contrasting brass details.

The wide camera bump for the webcam adds some nice visual interest to the lid, and the minimalist MSI logo on the top cover is a matching copper to mirror the chassis detailing.

MSI has kept the small 13-inch chassis remarkably light, even with sturdy 2-in-1 hinges. The biggest drawback of the Summit’s chassis is how easily it picks up fingerprint smudges on the top cover, keyboard deck, and bottom panel.

The Summit 13 measures 11.82 x 8.75 x 0.64 inches and weighs 2.9 pounds. While this is not the slimmest or lightest 13-inch laptop we’ve ever reviewed, it is pretty thin for a 2-in-1 convertible system. These are still pretty portable dimensions, even when compared to other thin and light AI PCs like:

• Asus ExpertBook P5: 12.3 x 8.8 x 0.59 inches, 2.84 pounds
• HP EliteBook Ultra G1q: 12.31 x 8.79 x 0.44 inches, 2.9 pounds
• Asus ZenBook S16 (UM5606): 13.92 x 9.57 x 0.47~0.51 inches, 3.3 pounds
• Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2024, M4): 12.3 x 8.7 x 0.61 inches, 3.4 pounds

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Ports

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The MSI Summit 13 is a slim 2-in-1 business laptop, so it doesn't feature every port under the sun, but it's an impressive array, given the limitations of its size. The average professional should be covered by this collection of ports:

• 2x Thunderbolt 4 (with power delivery, DisplayPort 1.4)
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A
• 1x HDMI 2.1
• 1x Audio combo jack

However, if you plan to use the Summit 13 AI+ Evo to power your office workstation, you may want to invest in one of the best laptop docking stations or USB-C hubs so you can connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse without maxing out your ports. A docking station or hub could also get you an SD Card reader if you need one for work.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Battery life

Even for an AI PC laptop, the Summit offers great battery life. Despite its mid-size 70Whr (watt-hour) battery, I got through a full workday on the Summit with the display set to max brightness, multiple Chrome tabs open, and a few programs and games downloading in the background. At the end of the day, I still had enough battery left to make it through most of a second workday.

So if you forget your charger at home, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

The Summit 13 AI+ Evo isn’t the longest-lasting laptop we’ve ever tested, but it is on the high end, lasting almost 17 hours on the Laptop Mag battery test for an average of 16 hours and 52 minutes, which will get you through an overtime shift, entirely unplugged.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Security and durability

Security is often a major consideration for business and professional laptops, as you do want to keep your sensitive files secured. For that reason, MSI has included a fingerprint scanner in the Summit 13 alongside a webcam shutter, a discrete trusted platform module (TPM) 2.0 security chip, and a Microsoft Pluton security processor.

MSI also offers secure sign-in via Windows Hello for an added layer of protection for your data, and you can use the proximity sensors for Smart Guard to keep your files private for your eyes only.

And if you’re more worried about durability, the Summit 13 meets the MIL-STD-810H standards. So this business laptop can withstand extremely high and lower temperatures and low-pressure environments and is resistant to shock, dust, and moisture.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Display

The MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo features a 13.3-inch, 1920 x 1200, 60Hz IPS touchscreen display with a glossy panel. The screen does have slightly thicker bezels along the edges, but they aren’t egregiously large.

The display itself is vivid with a good degree of contrast, which I took notice of while watching the new trailer for Warner Bros. Picture’s The Alto Knights, an upcoming crime thriller starring Robert De Niro in a dual role as New York crime lords Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Like many films about organized crime, the trailer relies on high-contrast dynamic lighting and vivid colors to build tension and highlight the duplicitous nature of the subjects. To the credit of MSI’s Summit 13, the glossy IPS display was bright and vivid where needed, and had crisp, clean details even in dimly-lit scenes. Considering the Summit 13 covers 120% of the sRGB color gamut and a respectable 85% of the DCI-P3 gamut, it’s no surprise the display looks fantastic.

The Summit 13 AI+ Evo hits a peak average brightness of 366 nits, which isn’t the brightest panel, but it is bright enough to cut through screen glare. And with a glossy display, that’s a necessity.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Keyboard, touchpad, and stylus

The Summit’s keyboard boasts white LED backlighting and a satisfying activation behind each key. While the key travel is a bit higher than I like, the crisp feel of the membrane helps alleviate my usual troubles with high-activation switches.

On the 10fastfingers.com Advanced typing test, I averaged 85 words per minute (WPM), a little below my usual 88 WPM average on the Apple MacBook Pro 14 keyboard. The Summit’s keyboard offers a decent amount of space between the keys, but the keyboard deck is a little small, making it easy to mistype. While I have had worse typing experiences by far, the small keyboard deck does make things feel a bit cramped.

Like a lot of 2-in-1 convertible laptops, the Summit features a smaller touchpad. It measures 4.7 x 2.3 inches, so it’s a rather wide but on the shallower side. However, I didn’t notice any issues with the touch real estate while I was too easily distracted by the silky feel and smooth gesture controls.

You can also use the Summit as a tablet, if you dare. It does include the MSI Pen2. The Pen2 comes with replacement tips, and it can be used to write on paper as well as the IPS touchscreen, which is a nice bit of value for an otherwise standard touchscreen stylus.

The stylus itself is pretty comfortable in hand and lightweight enough to prevent fatigue while drawing. It works out of the box with button functionality with select and erase shortcuts for OneNote by default. The stylus controls are slick and the ideal tool for navigating while the Summit is in tent and tablet modes. You can also customize the Pen buttons using the MSI Pen app, to set application-specific shortcuts, which is ideal for tool-heavy content creation applications. You can charge the MSI Pen2 with USB-C.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Audio

Since the Summit is a 13-inch convertible 2-in-1, so there isn’t a lot of space to pack a robust speaker system into the chassis. While MSI did put dual bottom-firing speakers in the Summit 13, there’s no impactful sound experience here. The speakers aren’t enough to fill a small room, even at full volume.

I decided to give into nostalgia and kicked up Murder by Death’s “I’m Afraid of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf.” The Summit could mostly cope with the brooding indie track, hitting the correct amount of distortion and crisp clear notes from the piano and violin, but the bass was barely audible on the Summit’s beleaguered speaker array. Things only got worse when I tested more bass-heavy tracks. Allegaeon’s “Parthenogenesis” may not be the most bass-heavy track, but I felt like I was listening through an MSI-branded tin can.

The Summit’s speakers are enough to watch the occasional video, but I wouldn’t recommend it for a streaming binge without a set of the best headphones or best computer speakers.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Performance and heat

MSI powered the Summit 13 AI+ Evo with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V “Lunar Lake” processor, which was designed to be highly efficient (boosting its battery life). Because of that, its performance is not as snappy as its Qualcomm or Apple competitors. But as previously noted, even the Lunar Lake series multithread performance is about equivalent to a Core i7-11700K desktop processor. So you get some solid power, even if the Summit isn’t breaking any benchmark records.

I handled my day-to-day work with ease thanks to the Summit, which included 20 research Chrome tabs, Photoshop, YouTube videos, and games running and downloading in the background. That performance was pretty consistent even on battery power. You’ll juggle your email, spreadsheets, video conferences, and even some creative applications without hitting any bottlenecks.

The main drawback of pushing the Summit’s performance is heat management. As the Summit is a 13-inch convertible laptop, it tends to run warm when pushed to the limits. After fifteen minutes of video streaming, we measured its hottest point at 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit on the underside. The keyboard also got rather toasty, hitting 97 degrees between the G and H keys. This is above the Laptop Mag comfort threshold of 95 degrees. So you may want to be careful about resting the Summit on your lap while handling heavier workloads, but it won’t be singeing your fingertips off.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Gaming and graphics

The Summit is a 2-in-1 business laptop, not a gaming device. But it does have enough graphic power to handle some casual gaming if you’re the type who can’t be logged out of your games for too long.

As a self-described MMO hermit, I am exactly the type of person who would use the Summit to play games. The Summit’s Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor comes with an integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics tile, so it does have a bit of gaming power. I tore through my daily 4-player dungeon and 8-player trial in Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail without much issue getting up to 60 frames per second on the Standard (Laptop) graphics preset, though other Lunar Lake computers have handled the game more smoothly.

However, most will use the Summit 13’s iGPU for AI features or graphics rendering. The Summit generated images based on text prompts in Copilot and in Photoshop within just a few seconds.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: AI features

Like all AI PCs, the Summit 13 AI+ Evo features an NPU (Intel AI Boost). Now, not all AI PCs are Copilot+ PCs, but Copilot+ functionality recently rolled out to include the Summit 13 AI+ Evo.

This means the Summit can access the full suite of Windows Studio Effects, including background effects like portrait blur, eye contact, automatic framing, and voice focus. You also get Microsoft’s other Copilot+ AI features like Cocreator in Microsoft Paint, Live Captions for autotranslation and real-time captions, and the full app experience for the Copilot companion AI.

Through MSI Center, you also get multiple AI hardware optimization features like Intelligent modes like Intelligent Meeting, Intelligent Entertainment, and Intelligent Work to better optimize your performance and efficiency settings to get the best out of your MSI laptop. But MSI Center S on the Summit 13 also offers additional AI features like AI Noise Cancellation, Smart Brightness, and Studio Effects for the built-in webcam and microphone.

Because the Summit 13 AI+ Evo features an Intel Lunar Lake processor, it also gets access to Intel’s open-source AI platform, Intel AI Playground, which lets you import your own LLM models, though ComfyUI and Llama are optional models you can import on installation.

While I’m still not entirely sold on the need for Copilot+ AI, it is nice to see it hit more platforms than just the Qualcomm Snapdragon systems.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Webcam

The Summit 13 AI+ Evo sports an FHD IR webcam which is pretty sufficient for the occasional web call or virtual meeting. The raw camera feed offers decent color fidelity without much color bleed, even with my bright blue hair.

You can enhance your webcam experience with the Copilot+ Windows Studio Effects, which offer additional background blur effects, automatic framing, and eye-contact correction. While the eye contact correction strays on the right line of avoiding the uncanny valley, it may not be the ideal choice for everyone.

Automatic framing was interesting, if a little disconcerting to watch happen live, but it would certainly be useful for streaming presentations, to keep the speaker in focus. My largest issue was the portrait blur background effect which adjusted the lighting, changing the colors of the video feed and distorting the image. I made the mistake of combining portrait blur with the automatic framing, which was beyond distracting.

Since the Summit features just an FHD webcam, the feed can be a little grainy when at full-screen, so if you plan to use the Summit 13 AI+ Evo for a lot of video calls or presentations, we recommend using one of our best webcams instead.

MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo: Software and warranty

The Summit ships with Windows 11 Pro, which includes standard Microsoft applications like Copilot, Microsoft 365, Windows Media Player, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams. The Summit also comes with Intel applications like Intel Graphics Command Center, the Killer Performance Driver Suite, and Killer Intelligence Center.

You also get the MSI Center S and MSI Pen applications pre-installed as well so you can customize your performance settings, monitor your hardware usage, enable AI features like “Smart Screen” settings, and customize your MSI Pen2 click settings.

While this is not a clean Windows 11 Pro installation, MSI doesn’t load a lot of proprietary software to the Summit.

The MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo features a 3-year limited warranty, including a 1-year Global warranty.

Bottom line

There are plenty of reasons to recommend the Summit 13 AI+ Evo. It offers almost 17-hours of battery life, dependable performance, a bright display, a satisfying keyboard, sturdy hinges, and it comes with 2TB of storage space and a stylus for just $1,599.

While we would be griping about that price for a plastic laptop if this were a consumer model, the inflated price tag is pretty common for business and professional laptops. And if you’re going to use the Summit 13 as your work laptop and work laptop only, it’s worth considering.

But if you want to use the Summit 13 AI+ Evo as your personal laptop that you sometimes use for work, we would advise against it. While the cramped keyboard can be worked with, and the easily smudged plastic chassis isn’t a dealbreaker, the poor audio quality and low volume make it hard to use the Summit 13 for entertainment purposes. And while you can game on the Summit 13 AI+ Evo, you’d be better off opting for the MSI Claw 8 AI+ if you want an MSI AI PC that’s designed for gaming.

As far as business laptops go, the Summit is a solid choice. In fact, if it wasn’t for the dim audio volume and cramped keyboard, it would be the ideal choice for the office.