oh my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined honestly speaking i was
afraid that microsoft was just gonna let the surface lineup quietly die i mean
years ago they made some nearly perfect devices and then just
didn't fix small issues for years while
all of the other Windows machines on the market leapfrogged them
until today this is the all-new
surface laptop studio and for a lot of
people this might very well be the best
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but lioness you might say after your investment in framework how can you
possibly declare something else to be the best Windows laptop on the market
well it starts with the display this
is the new benchmark for how displays on Windows machines should work it has a
120 hertz refresh rate so everything from dragging around a window to just
interacting with the machine feels snappier while also making you a better
gamer of course it has the classic surface three by two aspect ratio and
it can do this whoa whoa hold on a
second okay no we're going to talk about that a little bit more later
so cool my only real complaint about the screen is
the rounded corners and i don't mean rounded in software like the the display
has rounded corners it's got some pixels hacked off this is something that can
make sense on a phone where they have a super high screen to body ratio and
they're meant to sit comfortably in the palm of your hand which is round here
though i don't get it like the mouse even moves all the way
into the corner so i'm pretty sure Windows is just treating this display
like there's some phantom pixels there
one problem that this gorgeous high refresh rate screen brings to light
though is the pulling rate of the track pad according to mouse rate checker this
track pad is pulling at it looks like probably 144 hertz which was totally
fine with a 60hz display but now could
result in nearly a frame between when you interact with your touchpad and when
that gets turned into useful movement now to be clear i don't think that any
laptop makers out there have dealt with this yet and it is a lot less obvious on
the surface than it is on the hp z book review coming soon make sure you're
subscribed by the way but it seems like a really easy way for microsoft to make
this device truly feel way more responsive just like phone
manufacturers are doing with their touch screens where you'll see that the pulling rate of the touchscreen is
usually double or more compared to the refresh rate of the display to
demonstrate why this matters we'll do a classic demo moving a mouse cursor back
and forth across a dark background you see those differences in the spacing of
the pointer that's because sometimes the frame gets refreshed immediately after
the track pad was pulled and other times there's that gap and you can see the
difference when you plug in an external device like this final mouse thousand
herzegure i think that's what the model is called by the way thank you very much dell for
actually including this usbc to a and
HDMI adapter with your laptops microsoft didn't seem to feel that was necessary
in spite of the fact that the surface has i don't know what to call this i o other
than surface headphone microphone combo jack their
proprietary bullet connector and then two at least thankfully Thunderbolt 4
ports so that's an improvement but no usb type a as expected yeah that's
visible to the naked eye it's i mean it's not perfect it's just that when
you're pulling at a thousand hertz those differences are much smaller don't get
me wrong though this trackpad it's really good maybe even exceptional the
size is solid the tracking is accurate and now instead of a click they're using
haptic feedback so you can actually tune the force to your liking i do wish they
gave us a bit more tuning options like we had in the sensel software but this
is still an easy a plus trackpad also an easy a plus keyboard surface
devices have always had pretty solid keyboards with the
exceptions being the ones that you clipped onto them those were not
always great but this one
feels good even compared to the good ones the keys are snappier than on the
surface laptop and on the surface book but there is still enough travel to
prevent fatigue when you're typing all day add in the exceptional chassis
rigidity and you've got one of the best mobile keyboards on the market what we
haven't discussed just yet though is the performance and the reason
is that it is one of the low lights of the device i mean it's fine it's fine
for most people a core i7 11370h and an
rtx 3050 ti will be powerful enough for
anything they would want to do but the problem is that it comes in at a very
similar price to the xps 15 which has an
8 core core i7 11800 h just to
demonstrate this point we're going to run cinebench but it shouldn't be
surprising that when you have two processors using the same
architecture you could literally forget to start the one of
them that has twice as many cores and it'll still win
so if you plan to do a fair bit again
so if you plan to do a fair bit of gaming this isn't going to be the device
for you in fact i'd recommend something like the zephyrus g14 it's not only
cheaper but it has a much faster rtx 3060 though if you manage your
expectations it's not like the surface laptop studio can't be used for gaming
this is hilarious totally off topic but can we just take a
moment to appreciate how nice the surface finish is like is that why they
call them surface man that soft touch though
it's incredible you know this is incredible
110 FPS and forza horizon 4 on
a productivity laptop to be clear it's not cranked this is medium and we had to
turn the resolution down a little bit but from a reasonable distance laptop
resolutions have gotten so high these days that you can turn them down a
little bit and it's not just immediately interpolation city this thing is
freaking quiet like anyone else notice that or rather
not notice it oh yeah super quiet
hello hello anybody in there
i should note by the way even though i complained there's no type a ports on the surface laptop studio there is one
on the power brick but that's just for charging that's not
for actually plugging in a usb device and using it so it's not like the
Ethernet jack on the imac m1 the point of all this though is that quiet is
worth nothing unless it's all so cool and the surface laptop studio is
not particularly cool you can see that the palm rests are up in the
low 30s mid-30s on this side
meaning they're not uncomfortable but if you were gaming on a winter day you'd
have yourself a nice little little hand little hand warmer here of course you're
not buying this thing for gaming anyway are you gaming's a bonus you get it for
this guy oh yeah
man those are strong magnets aren't they
i mean it's one thing to have a stylist that like clips onto your device but
that's really really incredible and i love the way
that they've got it tucked away so that if you're sliding the laptop into your
bag or something like that it's not going to get caught on something and
fall off now obviously if you guys have ever seen
my art you'll know i'm not qualified to evaluate the stylus so i handed it over
to the one and only sarah but to try it out for a bit
she felt that the feel was a bit cheap compared to the apple pencil but the
responsiveness is great with the surface laptop studio being able to handle
larger projects without slowing down something that can't be said for the
ipad pro it wasn't all sunshine and roses though while the pen itself is
great the problems she ran into had more to do with Windows having to regularly
switch between laptop and folded mode depending on the task and whether a real
keyboard was required i mean this won't be a problem for your student who's just
taking notes in onedrive or whiteboard but if you're a professional using
photoshop daily their touch only support in Windows leaves much to be desired and
you're gonna you're gonna want an external set of peripherals and the same
could probably be said about the looks it's got this kind of
chunky two-tiered vibe from the outside and
from the inside it suffers a little bit from
2015 macbook pro clone syndrome with the only distinctive feature being its gray
keyboard rather than it having a black one
that is until you do this
now this is far from the first two in one
device on the market in fact they've been making these things for like 10
years now but what makes this one unique is not just the fact that it can be
operated in laptop mode i would call this something akin to
easel mode and then tablet mode audio mode studio mode yeah
studio mode this yeah this is a tablet
not just that but the fact that it can switch between them so easily one of the
big problems with a device like this one from hp is that when you want to switch
from tablet mode because you just need to type something for a second you gotta
unfold the whole thing type the type type type and then rip wait around for
Windows to register okay you're back in tablet mode with this
okay hey touch screen i need you out of the way for a sec boom
and you're back it's really quick it's pretty cool what's less cool is
microsoft also sent us the surface ocean plastic for our
consideration it paired flawlessly with
our laptop and that's all i can really say about it
it looks stupid it has a low polling rate the ergonomics are terrible and
really the only question i have about it is why didn't you buy a real mouse what
you might not wish you bought at least if microsoft is to be believed however
is additional speakers they apparently have a total of four downward firing
drivers on this machine that are supposed to give it really impressive
sound and it takes a lot to impress us these days
in a world where apple's latest macbooks exist and honorable mention for dell honorable
mention for dell we're gonna compare it to that right now
okay let's hear adele that's not a dell that's crab rave
get it because it's adele thanks brandon
not bad okay
way fuller sounding yeah
it's not close yeah wow wow that is damn impressive and what's
also apparently impressive though i haven't tried it yet is the webcam now
i've gone ahead and i've gotten some little smudgies on there here we go
Windows hello ready set hello hi how you doing
boom signed in love it so this is
this is Linus central station here very respectable yeah without that
unfair backlight behind it that looks
you know pretty good i could do my morning makeup in there it's 1080p more
than almost every other webcam can say yeah
like dang not bad
what's a little more bad is the price the surface laptop studio technically
starts at sixteen hundred dollars but that one does not come with a dedicated
graphics card so the first laptop studio that you actually want is twenty one
hundred dollars far from cheap and that's even before
you pay for a memory upgrade so if you bought this version and realized
you know what i actually need 32 gigs of RAM
are you screwed or is there any way to upgrade it after the fact
let's open it up and find out we haven't actually looked inside this yet because
although it's only four screws on the corners of the chassis they're hidden by
the rubber feet making disassembly annoying and the potential device
looking kind of weird after pretty high so what microsoft says is this device
does not contain any user serviceable parts hard drive is only removable by an
authorized technician following microsoft provided instructions here's
an idea microsoft if the provided instructions are so
important why don't you provide them to everyone this is
have you have you removed this rubber foot yet no i'm afraid i'm going to screw it up it's a pain in the butt
that's not going back on right no
big bummer this does not want to come apart that is not its plan
you are sure it's for or should i keep peeling this bet
they told me i asked in the meeting they told you a
big fat lie my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined all
they had to do was have four exposed screws
to make it so that this wouldn't have been necessary i think this is glued
down oh i hate this so much so it looks like if i pry here we get a bit of oh
that just broke some stuff i legit just
don't get it what are we missing here
can't get a pic in there can't get a
pry tool in there sorry microsoft i'm sorry viewers i'm sorry alex i'm sorry
brandon that you have to witness this not sorry microsoft it's their fault
oh sorry everyone okay what was it
it was a screw it was a screw okay well now we know
there's a fascia piece like a like a
plastic sticker see this
there's a plastic sticker that covers up a couple of more screw holes here
also the battery came with that yeah um
this is a really unusual battery configuration
so it's actually a good lord what is this like a six piece
soft pack battery 56.3 watt hours
what how did they get 11 hours of battery life out of that
well hold on i can't tell well no this it can't be
just this one i was thinking maybe it's just this one and there's more capacity
here but no that's really impressive that would have to be the whole thing
for sure unfortunately we won't get a good look at the motherboard without
fully popping it off but i think there's a fair bit we can
see here we've got a one terabyte looks like customized SSD of some sort
they've at least done a fancy little microsoft heat spreader on
it
oh boy yep standard m.2 just got a nice little
microsoft themed shield on it
we really wanted to know the spec of this thing we could use a software to look at that this is cool super flat
heat pipe here going from the CPU over to an exhaust over here so the intake is
all along the side here and then the exhaust is here and then you see the
same thing on the other side where there is
where the hell's the heat pipe for this one at any rate there's another heat
pipe that goes over to the GPU which is right here and then this is our
dedicated fan for that so it looks like
the two coolers do not share CPU and GPU
cooling duty in any way yeah i like it i like it it's cool you
know what brandon we could go deeper but i think we know everything we need to
know if you don't order the right amount of RAM when you order you are
plumb out of luck i think this is salvageable alex if we
just order if we can get replacement parts if we just order a new base
battery thing and plunk it on here there is the issue of the smile to sort
out you can see it's a bit of a happy laptop
right now or sad depending on how you look at it
it's i think we could probably mostly buff
that out if you know what it means just kind of give it a little you know what whoa whoa
whoa i think i fixed it already yeah it's pretty straight hold on hold
on just gotta i mean that's the thing about these aluminum alloy
chassis right you can just give it a little oh yeah
bottom line great battery life great track pad
amazing display utterly unique form factor very usable probably one of the
best integrations of a stylus in a device that i've ever seen with those
nice strong magnets and all it costs you
is that you will never ever ever open it up and hope to
put it back together uh with upgraded components
and you will never ever hope to see a Linus tech tips video without this
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out our review of the alienware x17 that is that is one sick gaming laptop
sick like it has some problems no it doesn't they fixed them it just
didn't tell us oh they fixed the problems and just
oh well that's good