With some more juice, the Surface Laptop 3 would be hard to beat in this ultracompetitive category. I have a confession: I'm one of those freaks who actually loves the shallow keyboards on Apple's new MacBook Air and Pro laptops - but I prefer the Surface Laptop 3's keys even over those. The keyboard is also excellent, with just the right amount of distance between keys and and a satisfying 1.3mm travel. It feels super-smooth and has just the right amount of grip, and the extra, ahem, surface area is welcome.
However, the USB-C port does not support Thunderbolt speeds, which means it won't work with certain external GPUs.Īnd finally, the trackpad is 20% bigger. There's also the 3.5mm headphone jack and Microsoft's proprietary charger. It does mean you'll need a dongle to connect to an external display via HDMI over the USB-C connection if your monitor doesn't have a Thunderbolt or USB-C alt-mode connection, which still isn't very common. Microsoft has wisely ditched the Mini DisplayPort connection and replaced it instead with USB-C port, which complements the USB-A port. One of our few issues with last year's machine was the lack of a Microsoft says you can go from 0 to 80% in an hour: I got 74%, which I'll call close enough. One last note on battery is a new fast-charge capability.
Using the laptop in my daily life, I got between 5 and 6 hours of use out of it before it needed a recharge. Disappointingly, the Laptop 3's battery life was shorter than the Surface 2's and is slightly shorter than the Dell XPS 13's. Once again, given the Air's ultralow-power Y series processor, that's unsurprising. In my looped video-stream test, I got far more battery life out of the MacBook Air: 13 hours and 27 minutes for the Air versus just over 8 hours for the Laptop 3. As noted, the Surface Laptop 3 is significantly more powerful than the identically-priced MacBook Air and a good deal more so than last year's model. For a thin-and-light laptop, the power on offer here is above average. But there's no dedicated graphics card on either model, so creatives looking for a machine on which to do the bulk of their video editing are best opting for something with more power. You might be able to get away with Photoshop on the base-level 13.5-inch Laptop 3, and light video editing on the i7 version.
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