Microsoft Surface Laptop - Hands On Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhile larger stock has finally gone and done it this is the surface laptop and as you can see it is just a laptop unlike other surface products it doesn't do anything funny we try to put the screen back now this is definitely a break-in tradition for Microsoft with the surface line and it puts the company directly in competition with HP Dell even Apple with its MacBook Pro 13 now can mark soft handles those competitors let's find out now well this is a conventional laptop Microsoft hasn't stopped itself from doing a few things that are unusual one of which is this Alcantara surface on the interior of the laptop it feels great it is a form of fabric although it's pretty resistant to stains or scuffs or anything like that we don't think you're going to have any big problems in that regard it feels great it's warm its inviting it's a really nice touch that adds a premium and unique feel to the laptop now another great thing here in the interior is the keyboard keyboards awesome you can go for long periods typing on a good key travel very comfortable definitely improvement over some other smaller laptops now overall the laptop is very light and even when it's closed and you're dealing with the simple metal exterior it feels very premium although this does end up being a little bulkier than you might expect giving its 13-inch glass displays a 13.5 inch display so it's actually bigger than say a 13.3 inch by a little bit and the general design is a bit blunt a bit hard edge so it does end up filling maybe larger than the actual dimensions are another issue with this laptop is the ports situation so we really just have one USB port and one display port and a headphone jack and that's it really there is also the surface connector which technically can be connected to a Microsoft dock but you know that's an extra charge I believe the Microsoft dock is running around $200 now that definitely puts the connectivity of this laptop behind a lot of its peers now our 13 Dola reunion came with a core i5 1700 u processor a can go bytes of ram and a 256 gigabyte hard drive that Core i5 processor is really standard for this category machine maybe even a little below average but it did perform quite well in our test it appears that Microsoft has done a good job with the thermals on this laptop so and longer processor tests like a video encoding situation it does quite well the downside in terms of performance is the hard drive because it's only a SATA hard drive it doesn't use one of the fancier PCI Express style connections and that really hurts the performance overall it actually is up to two or three times slower than something like a Dell XPS 13 or an HP Spectre x-360 with a PCI Express hard drive now Microsoft does redeem itself in battery life this only has about a forty seven one hour battery which isn't that big but the battery life is on par with most of its competitors like the Dell XPS 13 if you're just watching a 1080p video you can expect about 12 hours of life you're doing some web browsing you expect eight or nine hours of life now it's not going to set any records but considering the size and weight of this laptop it's pretty good the display on this laptop has 22 56 by 1504 resolution that works out the 201 pixels per inch it's not the highest resolution out there but it's also not the lowest it's respectable it provides a pretty sharp image it doesn't quite compare it to something like an apple macbook pro 13 but it's close now this is a touchscreen although the screen doesn't rotate far back you can actually move it around with your finger and that's nice it's good to have that inclusion also surface pin-compatible surface now compatible although I don't know what you do with the diode with this fault screen obviously one really nice thing about the display is its color accuracy we found in our tests that it's really accurate compared to its competitors and that means when you're viewing things on the screen they look very vibrant but also not unrealistic you don't get fluorescent greens or reds jumping out of you the content pretty much looks like it should and that's really nice consider during the price point this laptop is targeting now perhaps the strangest thing about this laptop and something you wouldn't know just looking at it at a glance is the fact it runs Windows 10 s what is Windows 10 s well it's a version of Windows 10 that is restricted to the Windows Store app so if you try to run anything that's not in the Windows Store it's not going to let you do that and that is I'm it's just it's a problem it is just a problem there's no way of getting around that if you go live the Windows Store maybe you're not familiar with it you're going to see there's a lot of apps there that you probably want and that probably aren't there for example Google Chrome nope camera and Google Chrome you're pretty much going to have to rely on Microsoft edge if you want to run scheme games that's not really going to be possible there's this this wide variety of applications that will not run on this laptop out of the box now you can't upgrade the Windows 10 Pro doing so takes less than 10 minutes and until the end the year it is free after that it's going to be $50 so it's not a huge problem if you're someone who knows what you're doing with Windows you're very familiar with it you don't mind hitting that upgrade button but a lot of people are going to expect to have your regular Windows apps available right out of the box and that's not the case here and that's probably going to make some buyers a little wary of picking up this laptop now overall there's a lot to like about the surface laptop it's well engineered it has this really nice interior finish great keyboard great screen but there's also a few problems that do drag it down like Windows 10s which is definitely an annoyance also the hard drive is not the quickest and the price at $1,300 is a little bit more than a lot of comparable systems you can get a Dell XPS 13 with the 1080p display for less you can get an Asus in both ux3 30 UA for a lot less the $700 system and has a lot of the same internal components into it it's also pretty nice even keeps up with this on battery life and that's really what it comes down to this is a good laptop but it's also an expensive laptop with some annoyances so if you're just looking for a laptop and you're not really all that interested in getting involved in the whole surface ecosystem this probably isn't the one for you but that said if you are a big fan of Microsoft service products and you resist really hoping for a standard laptop to use everyday this is for youwhile larger stock has finally gone and done it this is the surface laptop and as you can see it is just a laptop unlike other surface products it doesn't do anything funny we try to put the screen back now this is definitely a break-in tradition for Microsoft with the surface line and it puts the company directly in competition with HP Dell even Apple with its MacBook Pro 13 now can mark soft handles those competitors let's find out now well this is a conventional laptop Microsoft hasn't stopped itself from doing a few things that are unusual one of which is this Alcantara surface on the interior of the laptop it feels great it is a form of fabric although it's pretty resistant to stains or scuffs or anything like that we don't think you're going to have any big problems in that regard it feels great it's warm its inviting it's a really nice touch that adds a premium and unique feel to the laptop now another great thing here in the interior is the keyboard keyboards awesome you can go for long periods typing on a good key travel very comfortable definitely improvement over some other smaller laptops now overall the laptop is very light and even when it's closed and you're dealing with the simple metal exterior it feels very premium although this does end up being a little bulkier than you might expect giving its 13-inch glass displays a 13.5 inch display so it's actually bigger than say a 13.3 inch by a little bit and the general design is a bit blunt a bit hard edge so it does end up filling maybe larger than the actual dimensions are another issue with this laptop is the ports situation so we really just have one USB port and one display port and a headphone jack and that's it really there is also the surface connector which technically can be connected to a Microsoft dock but you know that's an extra charge I believe the Microsoft dock is running around $200 now that definitely puts the connectivity of this laptop behind a lot of its peers now our 13 Dola reunion came with a core i5 1700 u processor a can go bytes of ram and a 256 gigabyte hard drive that Core i5 processor is really standard for this category machine maybe even a little below average but it did perform quite well in our test it appears that Microsoft has done a good job with the thermals on this laptop so and longer processor tests like a video encoding situation it does quite well the downside in terms of performance is the hard drive because it's only a SATA hard drive it doesn't use one of the fancier PCI Express style connections and that really hurts the performance overall it actually is up to two or three times slower than something like a Dell XPS 13 or an HP Spectre x-360 with a PCI Express hard drive now Microsoft does redeem itself in battery life this only has about a forty seven one hour battery which isn't that big but the battery life is on par with most of its competitors like the Dell XPS 13 if you're just watching a 1080p video you can expect about 12 hours of life you're doing some web browsing you expect eight or nine hours of life now it's not going to set any records but considering the size and weight of this laptop it's pretty good the display on this laptop has 22 56 by 1504 resolution that works out the 201 pixels per inch it's not the highest resolution out there but it's also not the lowest it's respectable it provides a pretty sharp image it doesn't quite compare it to something like an apple macbook pro 13 but it's close now this is a touchscreen although the screen doesn't rotate far back you can actually move it around with your finger and that's nice it's good to have that inclusion also surface pin-compatible surface now compatible although I don't know what you do with the diode with this fault screen obviously one really nice thing about the display is its color accuracy we found in our tests that it's really accurate compared to its competitors and that means when you're viewing things on the screen they look very vibrant but also not unrealistic you don't get fluorescent greens or reds jumping out of you the content pretty much looks like it should and that's really nice consider during the price point this laptop is targeting now perhaps the strangest thing about this laptop and something you wouldn't know just looking at it at a glance is the fact it runs Windows 10 s what is Windows 10 s well it's a version of Windows 10 that is restricted to the Windows Store app so if you try to run anything that's not in the Windows Store it's not going to let you do that and that is I'm it's just it's a problem it is just a problem there's no way of getting around that if you go live the Windows Store maybe you're not familiar with it you're going to see there's a lot of apps there that you probably want and that probably aren't there for example Google Chrome nope camera and Google Chrome you're pretty much going to have to rely on Microsoft edge if you want to run scheme games that's not really going to be possible there's this this wide variety of applications that will not run on this laptop out of the box now you can't upgrade the Windows 10 Pro doing so takes less than 10 minutes and until the end the year it is free after that it's going to be $50 so it's not a huge problem if you're someone who knows what you're doing with Windows you're very familiar with it you don't mind hitting that upgrade button but a lot of people are going to expect to have your regular Windows apps available right out of the box and that's not the case here and that's probably going to make some buyers a little wary of picking up this laptop now overall there's a lot to like about the surface laptop it's well engineered it has this really nice interior finish great keyboard great screen but there's also a few problems that do drag it down like Windows 10s which is definitely an annoyance also the hard drive is not the quickest and the price at $1,300 is a little bit more than a lot of comparable systems you can get a Dell XPS 13 with the 1080p display for less you can get an Asus in both ux3 30 UA for a lot less the $700 system and has a lot of the same internal components into it it's also pretty nice even keeps up with this on battery life and that's really what it comes down to this is a good laptop but it's also an expensive laptop with some annoyances so if you're just looking for a laptop and you're not really all that interested in getting involved in the whole surface ecosystem this probably isn't the one for you but that said if you are a big fan of Microsoft service products and you resist really hoping for a standard laptop to use everyday this is for you\n"