MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP 4
The Surface Laptop 4 looks great, is wonderful to use, and packs plenty of power
Powerful and packing a vibrant screen, this is a cracking Windows laptop
The Surface Laptop 4 covers a lot of bases – you could argue it’s one of the best lightweight laptops, best student laptops, and best laptops full stop, and that’s a mark of just how well made this Microsoft machine is.
It’s certainly hard to fault the Surface Laptop 4 in terms of its design and visual appeal – the aesthetics here are top-notch. There are only so many ways to design a laptop of course, but that said we do like what Microsoft has done here: there’s a premium fit and finish all round, and that extends to the display hinge, which feels solid and reliable.
Our review unit came with a 13.5-inch, 2,256 x 1,504 pixel IPS LCD screen, which is sharp, bright and vibrant – just about everything you could want, even if it doesn’t quite reach the deep blacks and contrast levels you get with OLED. We also like the 3:2 aspect ratio, which means you can see more of a document or a website at one time. If we did have a quibble, the bezels are a little on the thick side for 2021, but it’s fine really.
In terms of ports, there’s not a great selection, though it’s fairly standard for a laptop of this size and weight: you get one USB-C port, one USB-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and the Surface Connect port that Microsoft likes to put on its laptops. That proprietary port does rather limit you in terms of chargers and other accessories, but it’s not something that’s a huge drawback.
Our Surface Laptop 4 review unit came with an 11th-gen Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor, plus 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Other configurations are available, at different price points: you can get up to an i7 Intel processor, for example, while AMD options are also available, and the RAM goes all the way up to 32GB.
You’ll be pleased to know that the laptop is fully Windows 11 compatible too, and in our time with the device it breezed through everything that we asked of it: editing documents, working with images, browsing the web (with dozens of tabs open at a time), and even some light gaming. The 11th-gen Intel chips do come with integrated Iris Xe graphics that can play less demanding games at reasonable resolutions and frame rates.
Microsoft reckons you can get about 17 hours of battery life out of this laptop with ‘typical device usage’, which might be a bit on the optimistic side. In our tests, two hours of video watching – albeit at maximum display brightness – drained the battery by 16% on average, suggesting around 12-13 hours in total.
At the time of writing, the base model can be yours for £999/$999 – and more advanced models (like our review model) will cost you significantly more than that. But that’s not a bad price for what you get: Microsoft has neither underpriced nor overpriced this device.
In our time with the Surface Laptop 4 we were very impressed with both the performance of the laptop and how it felt to use. For a well-priced Windows laptop that can do just about everything well, apart from the most demanding tasks, this is absolutely one of the best options out there.