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Microsoft Surface laptop four is here.
I've got one of the very first models and I'm gonna tell you what surprised me about it.
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So Microsoft Surface Pro, that's the tablet with the detachable keyboard always gets all the attention.
It's kind of a flagship.
But I've always thought the Surface Laptop is really the secret hero of that line.
Knowing the Surface Laptop was introduced a few years ago, it was a very competent nicely made 13 inch laptop.
It was a little weird in that, it had an Alcantara, fabric wrist So that's something you don't see in laptops very often, but it was nicely designed and you had Microsoft doing the hardware and the software.
That's kind of how Apple makes the operating system and the hardware for their Macs.
You get some good synergy that way, but more importantly, I like the surface laptop because it was frequently on sale and if you got a good discount from the Microsoft Store when they had one of these, occasional price cuts, you can get a very nice 13 inch surface laptop with a core i five or under $800 For the surface laptop three, Microsoft added a 15 inch version and that was a little bit of a tougher case to make.
In the 15 inch space, there's a lot more competition for these sort of creative pro or Semi Pro laptops where you may be doing Photoshop or editing in Premiere, or doing some 3D designing and, you know, maybe playing games.
And also it was much more expensive.
You really didn't get that sense that you could get a good bargain on that 15 inch surface laptop.
Although again, it was a very competently made, perfectly nice laptop and they even had some a AMD boggles, well now for the surface laptop for Microsoft is really stepping up on the AMD side so you get both Intel and AMD versions.
Now the least expensive right now at 999 is the 13 inch model and That has an AMD processor.
If you trade up for a few $100, you can get into an Intel Core i5 the 15 inch model starts more expensive 1299 again, AMD, but then you leapfrog a bit between Intel and AMD.
And what I have right here is the 1699 version.
It's got an AMD Ryzen 7, but that's the older generations Zen 2 not Zen 3.
And it's got 16 gigs of Ram and a 512 SSD.
That's what I would call a standard walk in the door configuration for a really professional level, 15 inch laptop.
You can get the same configuration, but within Intel core i7 than a current gen 11 gen Intel core i7 for a hundred dollars more, maybe that's something to look at.
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Now one of the big things Microsoft is claiming about this new version of the surface laptop line is that, it's gonna get better battery life.
And interestingly, they're saying it's the AMD models that are going to get the best battery life.
If you get a 13 inch AMD version, Microsoft says you can get up to 19 hours of battery life and that's a lot better than the surface laptop three where battery life is really kind of one of the The weak spot and the 15-inch and e-version they say 17 and a half hours.
Now, of course a laptop manufacturer is always gonna give you the best possible case battery life.
We of course are gonna do our own testing and find out how long this guy will last.
Generationally, going from Surface Laptop 3 to Surface Laptop 4, there are not really a lot of huge changes.
The screen remains the same.
And for me, that's always been one of the highlights.
This was one of the first laptop lines to really embrace a three by two aspect ratio display.
Now, a lot of laptops are still 16 by nine that's wider.
That's kind of like an HDTV, great for watching movies, maybe not great for office work.
And now that we're all working from home You want kind of a more, you work friendly screen, so three by two gives you a lot more height.
So if you're reading let's say a document on screen or working on a spreadsheet that goes up like this, you really get a lot more useful screen real estate from a three by two display.
The ports are the same, you get a regular USB a and the USBC no Thunderbolt.
Also no lt II options on this even though that is an option on a lot of the other surface products, just not the surface laptop.
And of course here's one fun bit if you miss the magsafe connection on Apple laptops were The power plug would connect magnetically.
If you tripped over it would just pull out.
Microsoft is one company that keeps that concept live.
They have got their own magnetic plug and it actually plugs in right down here.
There you go snaps in and if you walk by and tripped over the cable, it just pops right out.
Now I'm gonna say It's hard to put in sometimes it pops out by itself sometimes so compared to magsafe it is not nearly as good, but I appreciate it because I'm always tripping over laptop cables.
Now I have literally just taken this 15 inch surface laptop for out of the box.
I'm looking forward to setting it up doing a bunch of benchmark testing on it battery testing, doing some gaming Maybe doing some photo and video editing, so stay tuned and we will report back to you with what the performance is like in this 6099 version of the surface laptop 4.
