Affordable On-The-Go
Microsoft Surface Laptop Go
For laptops, I value portability immensely. To drive home this point, my on-the-go laptop is the 920g Apple Macbook 12, and I use it for mainly software development, and of course word processing. As such, to determine if the Surface Laptop Go can truly be called an ultraportable, I subjected it to a few of my real-world tests.
For convenience, I use a Pacsafe Crossbody as my tech bag, in which Surface Laptop Go fits comfortably, without inducing a backache whenever I carry the bag. For comparison sake, an Apple Macbook Pro 13-inch almost can’t fit into this crossbody, and is a huge deadweight. As such, the Surface Laptop Go passes the bag test handily, underscoring the compact and portable nature of the device, even if it can’t perform on a par with regular-sized notebook at the same price.
The Surface Laptop Go comes with a 12.45-inch PixelSense touchscreen with pretty slim bezels that I almost had to question where the 720p webcam went (which is fortunately present within the top bezel of the display). The “Go” -ness of the Laptop Go is in its native screen resolution of 1,536 x 1,024 pixels, yielding a pixel density of just 148
PPI. This resolution is not Full HD (2K res) and a far cry from the Laptop 3 series sporting a larger and higher pixel density screen with 2,496 x 1,664 pixels (or 201 PPI). Even the tablet-like Surface Go 2 sports a higher resolution screen (1,920 x 1,280 pixels). Unfortunately, one drawback of the Laptop Go’s screen, is the lack of support for the Microsoft Surface Pen.
The keyboard is a full-size Chiclet-style keyboard with 1.3mm key travel, and the trackpad is generously large for a device of its size and ample for daily use. It measures 115 x 76.66mm and supports five-point multitouch gestures.
Next, I conducted the ‘cafe test’ in temporary co-working spaces provided by hotels, whereby the scenario is similar to a cafe in that it can be difficult to find a power socket. Two types of tasks were undertaken - one to write this review using Microsoft Word, then Google Docs, and to do some simple software development (Python, NodeJS, React) the Surface Laptop Go, using Visual Studio Code as a code editor. Both Docker and consequently Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) were turned on throughout.
I managed to work through my review for about two hours before the battery dipped from 100% to 77%, and for software development, it depleted to about 61%. Not too shabby.
Just like many of its latest Surface offerings, the Surface Laptop Go can be charged either with the Surface Connect port (the default supplied charger), or through the USB-C port using USB Power Delivery (PD) compatible chargers.
One rather bad experience I had with ultra-low-power chips is that the system simply cannot cope with Android app development, nor can they deal with the demands of Docker. Amazingly, even though Surface Laptop Go is powered by an Intel Ice Lake Core i5-1035G1 CPU, a chip geared towards low-power usage, I found development to be mostly snappy, though there were slowdowns when developing for Android initially.
Photoshop and Lightroom apps work fine on my review unit
– that has 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. I don’t think I can say the same for the base model that’s endowed with only 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage.
Whilst the price point for the entry-levon
THE ADVANTAGES OF THE SURFACE LAPTOP GO IS THAT IT’S MORE COMPACT AND AFFORDABLE THAN OTHER OPTIONS.
el option may seem tempting at just $868, we advise readers to reconsider, as eMMC storage is slow, and 8GB RAM is really the absolute minimum baseline for a modern Windows machine to enjoy decent productivity.
The 8GB/256GB variant used in this review costs $1,388. Interestingly, the competition for the Surface Laptop Go isn’t from other brands, but it’s within Microsoft’s own Surface Laptop 3 13.5-inch option that starts from $1,488 , comes with a touchscreen and has a speedier Core i5 processor. There’s also the Surface Pro 7, which’s more similarly sized to the Surface Laptop Go, has a faster Core i5 processor and obviously, it is touchscreen-enabled for $1,388 (but without the keyboard). This means the most optimal SKU would be the 8GB/128GB variant at $1,088.
So all said and done, the advantages of the Surface Laptop Go is that it’s more compact and is much more affordable than other options. As long you don’t really require the extra performance potential and you really just need a simple, no-nonsense laptop (with a touchscreen as a bonus) that can get by with everyday Microsoft applications or cloud applications.