The Laptop Go is a strange and sometimes successful mix of Surface design and budget decisions
The Surface Laptop Go with me to the woods last week. He lived in my backpack for a few days and came for a 20-mile hike through trails and bridges of questionable integrity.
It is, without a doubt, light. It's definitely lighter than the MacBook Air I packed for travel too, at 2.45 pounds compared to the Apple device's 2.8. It doesn't feel like a ton, but when you spend eight hours hiking up and down mountains, every fraction of a pound makes a big difference to your lower back. And while I (sadly) don't hike every day, lugging a heavy laptop around can really do damage over time.
The screen brightness, on the other hand, is missing. Not surprising, really, for a low-cost, low-power device. It will work indoors, but combined with a reflective screen finish, it's pretty hard to see anything on the screen outside, even at maximum brightness. It's probably not a problem for most, but it feels like one of many corners the company has cut in an effort to cut costs.
Basically, Laptop Go is a case study in reverse engineering a budget laptop. It is the product of an expanding focus for the Surface line. Once almost exclusively from Microsoft In an effort to show what its software could do on premium and custom hardware, the brand has evolved in many different directions.
The company's attempts to lure creative professionals away from Apple coexist with its exploration of budget devices. The Laptop Go falls firmly into the latter category. Following the lines of the Go, the device tries to answer the question of whether the hardware principles it has been developing for years on the Surface line can be applied to a budget device.
It is an understandable and commendable effort on this front. Offering a truly premium laptop experience for a minimal price is a win-win. Of course, there is a lot to deal with here. To begin with, lowering your prices is a matter of determining what sacrifices you are willing to make. Then there is the fact that many companies have already done a lot of work in creating hardware for Chrome OS and Windows 10 S.
When Microsoft launched the latter operating system a few years ago, it did so on the Surface Laptop. It was an odd decision: offering its Chromebook competitor in the form of a device starting at $ 999. It took a few years, but the company finally has a device priced appropriately for the OS, starting at $ 549. One lesson the company has learned from the original laptop and the other Surface siblings is the importance of design.
The Laptop Go is a nice budget laptop. It is quite elegant and fits perfectly with the other members of the Surface family. The top and the keyboard case are made of aluminum. This is coupled with polycarbonate composite resin which feels quite plasticky to the touch. On the tactile front, the keys are a bit soft / rubbery for my taste and it will take some getting used to, but it sure beats typing on the vast majority of keyboard cases.
The port situation is mixed. I love that Microsoft has chosen to include both a USB-A and a C port, straddling the line between backward compatibility and future protection. Although at this point, I think the safest bet is to use multiple USB-C ports. The other side has only one port: a Surface Dock connector. The company is no doubt keeping the connection to keep the product working with existing accessories, but it's a good time to drop it in favor of USB charging.
Internally, too, things are a kind of mixed bag. The 10th Gen Intel Core i5 chip comes standard. That's a generous inclusion for a $ 550 laptop. But the base model is set to 4GB of RAM and 128GB. You'll want to update them - and this is where you start losing your budget.
Our review unit had 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, not bad. But it will cost you $ 900. Suddenly you can see how quickly you left the realm of cheap laptops. The fingerprint sensor is also only added as part of a $ 699 and up upgrade. It is also, oddly enough, the only part of the keyboard that glows, albeit around the edge. The exclusion of a backlit keyboard seems like a strange oversight here.
That said, the Laptop Go isn't a bad first attempt at offering a really cheap entry. As I said with the original Surface Laptop, I would recommend upgrading from Windows 10 S the moment you get the device for most users. But otherwise the system works quite well as a light and good-looking secondary device. But if you're not in a hurry for such a thing, it will probably pay off to see what Microsoft can do with the device a second time.