Surface laptops meaning Windows? Windows may offer more customization freedom than macOS but privacy wise, Windows is a much bigger offender.
If you can look at your DNS queries on your home network (pihole can be one option), I encourage you to compare macOS to Windows. Windows regularly phones home in many different ways. Personally on top of the pihole block lists, I've blocked about 15 other domains Windows phones home with. Every update seems to add more domains. I haven't blocked a single domain for macOS or seen any blocked domains for macOS.
The only way to get a telemetry free Windows is via LTSB (probably can not acquire it legally as a consumer), or to keep up with modifying updates and/or block lists. Not sure if that is any better than macOS's "bullshit compromise"s.
I use a highly stripped-down version of LTSC for Windows VMs and it still has tons of telemetry. Furthermore, DNS-based blocking is ineffective; it hardcodes fallback IP addresses if it gets an NXDOMAIN for telemetry domains. The only way I've found to permanently kill it is with sniproxy or the like, though I'm sure once they upgrade to TLS 1.3 that will stop working too.
If you can look at your DNS queries on your home network (pihole can be one option), I encourage you to compare macOS to Windows. Windows regularly phones home in many different ways. Personally on top of the pihole block lists, I've blocked about 15 other domains Windows phones home with. Every update seems to add more domains. I haven't blocked a single domain for macOS or seen any blocked domains for macOS.
The only way to get a telemetry free Windows is via LTSB (probably can not acquire it legally as a consumer), or to keep up with modifying updates and/or block lists. Not sure if that is any better than macOS's "bullshit compromise"s.