The Surface Laptop 4 is also compatible with the Surface Pen. Failing that you have a wide and deep trackpad below the keyboard with a positive action and great feedback. The display is also a touchscreen, and much as a certain manufacturer does not believe that a laptop should have a touchscreen, I will once more beg to differ.Īs a more traditional laptop touch is not as important an input mechanism as it would be on a tablet or 2-in-1 device, but there is something tactile and obvious to just reaching out and poking the screen. This is a laptop designed for doing stuff, not just consuming stuff. With many laptops looking at 16:9 and 16:10 ratio screens that suits multimedia and gaming, the squarer screen of the Surface Laptop 4 is a statement in itself. The screen is expansive and feels ready for work. It’s a pretty straightforward laptop design, with a few touches that allow it to be recognisable as a Microsoft laptop.įirst of all, it continues Microsoft’s use of a 3:2 ratio display. It’s a Surface Laptop, and you know what you are going to be getting here.

Looking at the rest of the laptop is delightfully straightforward. That’s the Ryzen inclusion and its contribution to performance and price taken care of.

Competing laptops are already available with the Ryzen 5000 series processors, but I don’t think that the Ryzen Surface Laptop 4 is being particularly marketed as the ‘power’ alternative, As I said it's being marketed as the entry-level machine that can still deliver the power and performance when needed. It’s also worth noting that this is not the latest Ryzen processor. This does contribute an extra boost to the longer battery life, but its worth noting. On the other side of the argument, the Surface Laptop 4 turns down the CPU performance when it switches to battery power, which helps get that extra battery life but do remember to turn the wick back up when you need some grunt. The biggest difference is of course the component price and how that allows for a more affordable machine. In terms of processing the Ryzen offers more multi-core performance over the Core equipped versions (although Intel is the single core champion). Putting aside the mismatched specs, why would you choose AMD over Intel? The Ryzen chips have better power efficiency, and tests between the two Laptop 4 models show that to be the case - with the AMD variant picking up at least an hour or more of extra running in general use cases.

Surface pro 8 stylus