Put simply, Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 5 is Microsoft’s answer to your question: What laptop should I buy? The Surface Laptop is Microsoft’s laptop for everyone, its Toyota Camry, remaining virtually unchanged for generation after generation. Your only choice is the size—13.5-inch or 15-inch—and what configuration you prefer.
If you’ve read our review of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4, you know almost exactly what to expect. The Surface Laptop 5 is nearly physically identical (with a sliver of difference here and there) to its predecessor, in both the 13.5-inch and 15-inch editions. Microsoft gave us the latter version for review.
The key changes are largely internal: an upgrade to Intel’s 12th-gen Core (Alder Lake) and the addition of Thunderbolt 4, which is tied to that processor’s capabilities. The latter is subtly significant, as it eliminates the dependence on Microsoft’s proprietary Surface Dock and allows you to choose from the broader ecosystem of Thunderbolt docks instead. Thunderbolt and/or a Thunderbolt dock provides a sizable upgrade in external I/O bandwidth, and that allows you to connect a multitude of legacy devices including two 4K, 60Hz displays. That significantly increases the Surface Laptop 4’s productivity possibilities.
The other interesting change that the Surface Laptop 5 brings with it is the elimination of an AMD Ryzen processor option, which in previous generations provided options for performance and battery life. Unfortunately, Microsoft simply settled on Intel’s 12th-gen Core (Alder Lake) for the Surface Laptop 5.
Microsoft made a more subtle change in the display with the addition of Dolby Vision IQ, a technology more commonly found in TVs to optimize high-dynamic range (HDR) content. Dolby IQ uses what the Laptop’s light sensor tells it about the ambient light in the room, and tries to adjust the.)
