Review: Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio
Price: Review unit $2,699 (around £1,980)
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio feels like a glimpse of the future. Microsoft’s new pull-forward design arguably improves upon the Surface Book 3, its spiritual predecessor, offering you a light menu of gaming, content creation, and everyday computing capabilities to choose from.
Tell us if you’ve heard this before, though: the Surface Laptop Studio doesn’t come cheap, and its excellent new inking capabilities require the separate purchase of a £120 Slim Pen 2. You can opt for Windows 11 to power this new 2-in-1 PC, though the new hardware, software, and drivers may make this a bit of a bumpy road to begin with. You’ll also have to decide whether this arguably niche device is worth the investment, versus general-purpose notebooks that may offer more value. Nevertheless, this is the most intriguing Surface of the last half decade.
HARDWARE
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio is available in a variety of configurations, ranging in price from about $1,600 (around £1,175) on up to over $3,000 (around £2,200). Essentially, you’ll have a choice between an 11th-gen Core i5 and Core i7 chip, specifically the ‘H35’ version that Intel launched this past spring. You can also choose from between 16GB and 32GB of RAM, as well as between 512GB, 1TB, and a whopping 2TB of SSD storage. (The SSD is technically upgradable by a ‘skilled technician’.) Finally, the Core i7 models ship with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics, a moderately powerful raytracing-capable GPU for content creation and light gaming.
Keep in mind that one of the standout features that Microsoft s highlighting in the Surface Laptop Studio – inking – requires the separate purchase of a new Surface Slim Pen 2 (£120), which can fit underneath the Surface Laptop Studio in a little receptacle. Selling the pen separately is by now a Surface tradition, though the Pen 2 feels like less of a prerequisite with the Studio than it does on the Surface Pro tablet line-up.
For a complete list of specifications, go to page 18.
