Though we loved the 13 – inchSurface Laptopwhen it first shipped two years ago, a lot has changed for thin and light premium laptops since then. Now the line just doesn’t stand out the way it once did, even the new 15 – inch model. At first it isn’t clear who the 15 – inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 is for: Compared to the rest of its many competitors , it’s not particularly light, or fast or feature packed. It’s not inexpensive or full of cutting-edge tech and it doesn’t have a long battery life. But it’s reasonably light, sufficiently fast, looks pleasantly sleek, is partly upgradeable, backward-compatible with previous power supplies and sold by Microsoft. So it probably does make sense for one class of laptop buyers: enterprise.
The pricing for the 15 – inch model starts at $ 1, 199 (£ 1, 199, AU $ 1, 999 ), but that version has only 8GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD.Windows 10 takes 20 GB, and if you’re a Microsoft Office shop that will take another 6GB, and with that little memory you’ll run a pretty large swap file. You really can’t run anything on that configuration except maybe cloud-based applications, and even then it’s barely really enough memory to hold Windows and a lot of browser tabs. It’s possible that this configuration was intended to run alightweight version of Windows rumored to compete with Chrome OS, but who knows.
Our $ 1, 699 (£ 1, 699, AU $ 2, 799 ) test configuration, with 16 GB RAM and a
(Microsoft Surface Laptop 3) 15 – inch)
Surface Laptop 3 15 – inch) | |
Price as reviewed | $ 1, 699 (£ 1 , 699, AU $ 2, 799) |
Display | 15 – inch 2, 496 x1, 664 (201 ppi, 3: 2 aspect ratio) pen and touch display |
PC CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 3580 U Microsoft Surface Edition |
PC Memory | (GB DDR4 SDRAM) *********************************************************************************** MHz |
Graphics | AMD Vega 9 |
Storage | 256 GB SSD |
Ports | 1 x USB-C, 1 x USB-A, headphone jack, proprietary power |
Networking | Wi-Fi 5 802. ***************************************************************************************************************************** (AC), Bluetooth 5 |
Operating system | Windows 10 Home 1903 |
Weight | 3.4 lbs / 1.5 kg |
The design is essentially the same as the13 – inch Surface Laptop 3, which means it’s basically a bigger(Surface Laptop 2, which was essentially just theSurface Laptop). There are two nontrivial differences: a monitor-compatible-via-dongle USB-C port replaces the mini DisplayPort connector and it’smore easily opened, so the SSD can be upgraded(the memory is still soldered and the battery difficult to remove). It also has a metal keyboard deck rather than the odd Alcantara fabric.
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