I’m impressed by the amount of effort that’s gone into a $1500-class laptop.
I had the Surface Laptop for a fortnight around California, and I usually take a Bluetooth speaker with me when I travel, but this time I genuinely didn’t need to use it - it was excess baggage. This is seriously one of the best laptops I’ve used for cranking Netflix at the end of a long day.
It’s more than powerful enough to fill a medium-sized room with audio at full volume, and unlike so many laptop speakers it doesn’t distort as it reaches maximum power. Microsoft’s little Surface Laptop also has surprisingly loud and clear and musically powerful speakers. This is a workaday, university and Netflix-after-dark machine, not anything more powerful - but it’s not meant to be. Both are more than powerful enough for everyday computing and puttering around the ‘net, as well as older gaming titles, but any AAA game from the last couple of years will not run at any kind of playable frame rates even at a reduced resolution on the Surface Laptop. That i7 sets itself apart with slightly more powerful Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640, too, rather than the HD Graphics 620 of the entry-level both config. The Surface Laptop runs either a dual-core 2.5-3.1GHz Intel Core i5-7200U in its base two specifications, or a dual-core 2.5-4.0GHz Intel Core i7-7660U in its top two. But, you have a laptop that’s always up to date, and far, far more impervious to viruses and malware than its competitors. You can’t get any of those tiny little programs that you use all the time - like WinDirStat, which I use more often than I’d ever thought, and GIMP and GiffingTool and so on. You can’t get Chrome on your Surface Laptop until (and if) Google puts it on the Windows Store. That means you’re restricted to only apps from developers that upload their apps to the store - an apparently simple process, but one that cuts both ways.
The Surface Laptop runs Windows 10 S out of the box, Microsoft’s latest attempt at creating a version of Windows that relies entirely on apps delivered through the walled garden of the Windows Store. The Surface Laptop uses Microsoft’s Surface connector to charge, but you can also connect a more powerful dock with multiple video and USB ports too. Its 13.5-inch, 3:2-ratio PixelSense display has a 2256×1504 pixel resolution, it works with the Surface Pen, and it’s 10-point multitouch touch-enabled if you want to tap away at your apps instead of clicking and typing. The Laptop measures 308x223x14.47mm, and it clocks in at just on 1.25kg - all good numbers when it comes to something you’re going to be carrying around a lot. But in plenty of other ways, it’s very very special. The Microsoft Surface Laptop is an ultraportable laptop that in some ways, is an utterly generic piece of computing hardware. Here’s what we thought of the Laptop when we gave it a spin late last year: What Is It?