Microsoft Surface laptop
Student debt in the United States now stands at $1.2
trillion. In the UK outstanding student loans top £100 billion. Microsoft has
made an fascinating contribution to the student debt crisis, by attempting to
increase it.
The machine I am typing on is a locked-down laptop aimed at
"students" and "classrooms" that costs £1,549. Tricked out
with 512GB of storage it would cost a student £2,149.
It may seem unfair to introduce Microsoft's first ever
laptop by reminding you that this is a luxury good with an eye-watering price
aimed at the debt-encumbered, but initially, the price of the Surface Laptop is
what will define it. Which may be unfair, but Microsoft chose to fight here,
not us.
That's not the whole story, though. The Microsoft Surface
Laptop is of course much more than a locked-down device, and the TV ads are at
pains to show us that it's really a premium laptop for wealthy people. To do so
means undertaking an official "jailbreak", converting Windows 10 S
into full fat Windows 10. Extracting it from the shackles of Windows 10 S is
free (for now) and just takes a couple of clicks, fortunately. So, if what
you're looking for is a Windows equivalent to the MacBook Air, then here it is.
I thoroughly enjoyed using it, and I'm certain it will sell
to business executives by the truckload. From a design point of view Microsoft
has done a terrific job.
Fuzzy felt
The Surface Laptop is a shade lighter than the MacBook Air,
but most definitely heavier than the newer, featherweight MacBook. Then again,
that is a severely compromised machine, so compromised it may account for why
you're looking at a Windows replacement for a Mac. The MacBook has an awful
keyboard and a brutal port selection. The Surface team wisely decided not to
copy it slavishly. The Laptop's bezel is much narrower than the MBA, and the
hinge is smart and straightforward. Of course, being a Surface, you get a
spectacular display: 2256 x 1504 pixels, which comes to around 201 pixels per
inch.
The m3 and i5 options have no fan, while the i7 is designed
to be “almost-fanless”, a claim which in Win10 S operation at least, I found
was fully justifiable. The battery typically got me through 7 or 8 hours,
sometimes more, although this is far short of the somewhat misleading “video
endurance” figure of 13+ hours quoted by Microsoft in its marketing materials.
The styling is restrained, and the port selection is
conservative, and I welcomed both design decisions. It comes with USB 3.0 and a
mini display port - but no USB-C. The designers must have thought: "let
Apple shoot themselves in the foot, by removing the ports that everyone uses
today, we won’t”. Few would have minded a second USB 3.0 port, though. .
It would have been smashing to have LTE SIM card support,
something promised for the Surface Pro later this year.
On this year’s Surface keyboard and the laptop too, you can
finally set the screen brightness in hardware. (Previously the
"brightness" function keys let you set the brightness of the keyboard
backlight).
The decision to surround the keyboard with a specially
treated fabric has caused plenty of comment. This is not your regular
alcantara, such as you find on Samsung’s S8 cases. That feels fuzzy to the
touch, but this is peculiarly smooth: it’s been treated to repel moisture from
sweaty palms, Microsoft told us.
Only time will tell will how these lovely machines look
after two years. The accumulation of acidic sweat, grease and random spillages
onto a laptop really takes a toll - surely only more so from a student
"lifestyle": alcohol, bodily fluids and lentils. For now I can only
say that it looks and feels great. It comes in four colours, a
"Cobalt" Blue that isn't really cobalt, it's less saturated, while
the Burgundy option looks terrific. The keyboard itself turned out to be one of
the machine's main attractions. Few machines could lure me away from a Thinkpad
T series for serious longform thousands-of-words-a-day writing, but this is the
next best I've found.
Audio is surprisingly good, given that it is forced through
the fabric of the keyboard bezel.
Price Table
After seven years, Apple got bored with its near-perfect
MacBook Air design, and now, the PC world finally has an excellent alternative.
Purely from a hardware standpoint, Microsoft's debut Laptop is superior to
Apple's MacBook. It's only thanks to Apple's better software and apps bundle
that the gap closes in the final reckoning: Windows never seems finished and
remains clunky. The out-of-the-box app selection on MacOS - including Mail,
Photos, and with Garageband and iMovie, Pages and Numbers no more than a click
away, blow away the "applets" bundled with Windows.
