Microsoft’s Surface machines have always been textbook demonstrations of how Windows 10 is meant to be, made by the people who also write the software. The Surface Laptop 4 runs Windows 10 Home as standard, but is available as a separate “business” version with Windows 10 Pro. The Windows Hello face recognition camera is fast and convenient, unlocking Windows as soon as you open the lid.
That was the brightness set to 70% with recommended battery settings, using Chrome, Windows Mail, Evernote, NextGen Reader, Typora and several messaging apps open, plus some image editing in Affinity Photo.įor perspective, Apple’s MacBook Air lasts twice as long on battery with faster performance. The laptop was very quiet with the fans inaudible even while doing fairly complex image editing, only becoming noticeable when fast charging the laptop or when doing a lot of updates and file syncing on first set up.īattery life was some way behind class leaders, however, lasting an eight-hour work day but not much more. Turning up the performance level to “better” or “max” made the machine significantly faster at the expense of battery life.
Performance was therefore very good for a general computing device, although the recommended power settings when running on battery made the machine sluggish while editing images. The 13.5in Laptop 4 was tested with a Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, which was around 10-15% faster according to benchmarks than the model it replaces. They still won’t beat machines with discrete graphics cards, such as gaming laptops, but will be able to better handle creative applications than the models they replace. For the first time Microsoft has made AMD’s Ryzen 5 processors available in the 13.5in laptop alongside Intel’s 11th-generation Core i5 and i7 chips with their significantly improved Xe integrated graphics.īoth chip options are faster than the outgoing 10th-generation Intel processors, particularly on the graphics front. The internal components of the Laptop 4 have improved quite a bit. Both the Surface Connect and the USB-C port can be used for power. The Laptop 4 has one USB-C, one USB-A and a 3.5mm headphones port in one side and the Surface Connect port in the other.
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