Gadgetory

well they actually went and did it Microsoft finally just went ahead and made the laptop everybody wanted them to make a thin and light computer with so few compromises and so much going for it that it's easy to recommend anybody actually it's easy to recommend everybody everybody that's looking for a Windows laptop at least and if you've been using a MacBook Air for the past few years this might be the first Windows laptop in a very long time that could convince you to switch because the surface laptop totally lives up to expectations I mean look at this thing it's burgundy it also comes with a couple other colors gold and blue and platinum you may have also heard that the deck the bit around the keyboard is fabric it's Alcantara and we will get to that in a minute the rest of it is aluminum and it's really sleek it has this matte finish in this wedge-like design it's all angles it's not very curved which I really like it's more of a Lamborghini than it is a Porsche and it feels totally model the surface laptop starts at the very important price point of a thousand bucks but you really should spend the extra three hundred bucks to bump up the processor the storage and the ramp that's the model that I'm using here you can also go crazy and spend up to twenty two hundred dollars on a radical expect out model but I don't think most people should need to get anywhere close to that they're also just a ton of nice touches and a few annoying things with the hardware the speakers are underneath the keyboard and they sound great even manage you to get decent stereo separation and speaking of those keys they're also great there's a solid amount of key travel and click eNOS and everything is just the right size and in the right place they're surrounded by that Alcantara fabric we've probably heard about so yeah fabric on your laptop what well I'll tell you what I think it's going to be fine maybe after months or years of sweaty palms this fabric will go to hell but I think it's going to be durable enough honestly I'm more annoyed by the fact that the way the fabric is glued to the body means that there's a seam between the screen and the laptop deck when the thing is closed but more importantly I kind of don't get the point of it it just feels nice and looks good and maybe that's enough of but at the end of the day I would have been just as happy with plain ol aluminum yeah whatever it's unique I'll take it and since this is a Windows laptop I have to point out that the trackpad actually works it's fast and accurate although I do like the max force touch trackpad a little bit better because on that one you can click down to the top of it my only complaint is that I wish it were just a little bit bigger okay before we go on about the hardware on the surface laptop you know we got to talk about this other laptop the MacBook Air because this thing it basically looks like a red version of this thing now we've been living with this design of the MacBook Air since 2010 and in that time a lot of other laptops have tried to topple it even Apple hasn't been able to topple this laptop as everybody's favorite laptop and for good reason it's basically the king of laptops so yes surface laptop looks a lot like the MacBook Air they have practically the same dimensions the surface laptop is just a little bit smaller but it's good at the same things that the MacBook Air is good at it's thin it's light it's got this wedge shape it's powerful enough for most things and most people want to do and it just it's just good at hating the basics of what a laptop should be but because the surface laptop was designed in 2017 it has features that you can't get out of MacBook Air like you can open it up and unlock it with your face and of course it has this big beautiful touchscreen I've used a lot of MacBook Airs and a lot of laptops and tablets since the air and all of them inevitably kind of cramp your style in some weird way taking two steps into the future and one step back the surface laptop though it's not trying to force you to do anything it's just trying to be the laptop that everybody really wants as far as performance goes I really have zero complaints the model I'm using is using the latest Intel Core i5 with eight gigs of RAM it's the $1,300 spec that I think most people should get running eight or so apps isn't a problem at all and really the only thing to say is that this will handle basically everything you want it to accept serious video editing and hardcore games under heavy duress this thing conked out at just over seven hours and under more normal use I was getting between eight or nine I could probably extend that if I were more careful with my apps my brightness but the whole point of this lot is that you don't have to think about it then there's the screen which is just bonkers big and beautiful it's a 13.5 inch touch panel under Gorilla Glass 3 that Microsoft claims is the thinnest surround it's also a 3 by 2 aspect ratio which I really love because I don't have to do so much scrolling to see everything it's also super high resolution it's 20 256 by 1504 pixels so everything not only looks sharp you can also fit more on the screen and also I should say it's super super reflective in sunlight so be ready for that now let's talk ports Microsoft decided to play it super conservative here there's no USB C or Thunderbolt 3 I think that's a mistake but Microsoft thinks USB C isn't ready for mass adoption yet I think we both make excellent points anyway what you do get here is one single classic USB a port and there's another one on the power adapter when you plug it in a mini DisplayPort and a surface connector for power that's all fine but I do wish they'd found a way to put an SD card reader on this thing even with classic ports you can never escape hashtagged on the life i've gone this far without talking about windows or more specifically the version that ships on the surface laptop Windows 10s that's because I'm going to tell you right now that the vast majority of regular people who won't and buy this thing are going to take the free upgrade to Windows 10 Pro and never look back it's a simple button click it just takes a couple of minutes to switch and I'm telling you you're going to do it you're going to do it because the Windows Store is an app desert Microsoft is shipping 10s by default to try and juice developers into putting their apps into the store but that hasn't happened yet other windows star apps are just really subpar the official Twitter app for example is a joke and many others aren't as good as their full Windows versions all of which honestly I think is a huge shame because the core of Windows 10 is here in Windows 10 s window snapping is great the system for notifications excellent and Microsoft has really figured out how a touchscreen should work on a laptop most of the time you just reach up to the taskbar which isn't very far but you can go full touch on some apps if you really want to I dearly hope that Microsoft can go developers and getting more and better apps into the Windows Store because I do like the idea of a managed version of Windows that's better about handling battery life and updates and security other than being limited only using the edge browser which honestly still needs a little bit of work this really doesn't feel like a half-baked version of Windows 10 it feels like Windows 10 if only the apps would catch up so I set up top the surface laptop totally lives up to expectations and that is true it does I think it's the new de facto Windows laptop that most people should get even if it is a little more expensive for the recommended $1,300 build but the other expectation that we had is that Windows Store apps still aren't good enough and there aren't enough of them either and that is also true which is too bad but the upgrade to Windows 10 Pro is free for now and I suspect that's going to continue for a while so if you want a Windows laptop and you can afford it you should get the surface laptop upgrade to pro and don't look back just make sure you wipe down the fabric every now and then you notice when people do guns they like like a gun is they they go like that like well that's wrong a hammer goes down so hell yeah you're cold not cool like that's done