At your Surface: Microsoft’s new laptop seems more interested in being useful

Surface with a smile: Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4 is light and powerful. Photo: Adrian Weckler

Adrian Weckler Twitter Email

April 29 2021 02:30 AM

One of the most appealing things about Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 4 is that it has a fairly clear idea of what it is and who it is for.

It’s not going for a hard IT or gaming crowd, or the dull, soul-destroying ecosystem of enterprise-approved standard laptops for workers (looking at you here, Dell, HP and Lenovo).

Instead, this is something much closer in spirit to a high-end MacBook Air. It happens to be powerful and light but is more interested in being nice to use than overtly muscular. I found it to be a great writing laptop, for example.

The touchpad is exactly the right size for easy access without being too large to risk mistouches.

The keyboard is fast and very easy to type on. It may not completely please those who yearn for the clickiest keyboard they can get, but I found it to be a really good, quick tool; nicely positioned, comfortable and fast.

The 13.5-inch screen on the Surface Laptop 4 is generally pretty high quality, with an adjustable 2256 x 1504 resolution – good enough for anything short of high-end professional photography or graphic design.

As is the norm for Microsoft devices, it’s a touch-sensitive display and can be used with Microsoft’s Surface Pen. This is very handy for digitally signing things or tapping a series of consents faster than you get a cursor to the relevant boxes.

It’s a boxy 3:2 format, too, instead of a more rectangular, landscape-oriented 16:9, which some laptops now come in. I love this design decision for two reasons. First, it gives you a little extra height for vertical scrolling. (When your eyesight is a little challenged, and you need slightly larger screen fonts, this is really helpful.)

Second, it makes a little more space for the keyboard and the touchpad. These elements are highlights of this laptop – spacious enough and clicky enough to make typing and navigation fairly effortless.

The only oddity about the 3:2 design is that movies on Netflix or Disney+ typically appear with letterbox-style margins. But that’s a small price to pay. Microsoft made the right decision here.

Negatives? There are one or two. The front-facing 720p camera is pretty mediocre, little better than a decent laptop from five years ago.

This doesn’t just affect the quality of the Teams or Zoom calls; it also contributes to the computer not recognising your face as a quick login from time to time. That starts to become genuinely irritating after a while, especially in bright, dark or ‘contrasty’ conditions, such as when you’re sitting outside in sunshine.

This is poor form from Microsoft. Not only has it had a long time to design this machine for our work-from-home life, but it actually powers one of the two most-used video-calling platforms (Teams). So why would it put such a low-resolution camera on a new, premium laptop during a pandemic? You’ll get a better professional image of yourself on a €99 smartphone.

I’d also say that the brightness level on the screen maxes out a little low for my taste, at well under 400 nits. Indoors this isn’t an issue; outdoors, in sunshine, it is. It’s possible that Microsoft limited this for reasons of battery life or cooling, but the result is that you’ll get a significantly brighter display on either Dell’s XPS or Apple’s MacBook Pro.

If I’m being really fussy, the black bezel margins around the screen are a little big for a premium laptop; in 2021 I’d expect something closer to a bezel-less screen, like Dell’s XPS laptops strive towards. The bezel isn’t just a visual nicety – it increases the size and weight of the laptop. You could fit a 13.5-inch screen into a noticeably smaller, lighter laptop than the Surface Laptop 4.

To be fair, none of these downsides are enough to knock the Surface Laptop 4’s overall appeal out. It’s still a very good, very likeable laptop.

But if I was buying one, I’m not sure I’d get the base €1,149 model (with an AMD Ryzen 5 chip, 8GB Ram, 256GB storage). Unless you really just want it for daily basics, 8GB of Ram feels light to me as a future-proof laptop. That leaves you likely facing either €1,699 (13.5-inch, 16GB Ram, 512GB storage, Intel Core i5 chip) or €1,899 (15-inch, 16GB Ram, 512GB storage, AMD Ryzen 7 chip).

Oddly, the configuration I got (13.5-inch, 16GB Ram, 512GB storage, AMD Ryzen 5 chip) in my test model is the one that I would choose if buying, but it isn’t available in the Irish Microsoft store.