(clapperboard clicking)
(fire booms)
- The Surface laptop was, for years,
my favorite laptop on the market,
and then they just kinda didn't do much with it
for years and years and a couple more years.
But we have the fifth generation here,
and it looks incredibly promising.
They haven't changed very much,
but what they have changed, I think,
will make a big difference.
Do you wanna see the 13 and a half or the 15 first?
- [Brandon] Big. - [Alex] Big? Okay. Alright.
It's 12th gen.
We've got the P-Cores, E-Cores.
I think it's looking pretty good.
Nice, simple packaging.
I don't know why they went with a nice fancy one
for the 13 and not for the 15.
Here we've got our power adapter, and this one is 65 watts.
One thing that I love about these surface chargers
is that it also comes with a type A port right here.
It only does five watts,
but that's more than enough to just like plug in your phone
and get a super easy charge,
not having to worry about packing all of your stuff.
Here we have the silver model.
On this side, all that you get
is Microsoft's proprietary BS Surface connector port.
On one hand, it's pretty great,
so I really appreciate that it has sort of like
the MagSafe technology so you plug this thing in here,
and then your child or dog or whoever runs by,
they hit the cord.
Your laptop doesn't fall on the ground.
Excellent.
That said, in the past,
pretty much everything that you want to do
had to be done through this port,
so you wanted to connect it to external displays,
docs or stuff like that.
You needed to do it through Microsoft's proprietary BS one
that was incredibly expensive.
Not anymore, 3.5 inch headphone jack.
Excellent.
We also have USB type A, I believe that's a 3.1.
The bit that is incredibly exciting.
We finally have Thunderbolt,
Thunderbolt four port right here.
So you can chuck this right here into the garbage,
and instead you can use your just normal thunderbolt doc
like you would for everything else.
Awesome, thank you so much Microsoft.
It only took you five generations
to do the absolute bare minimum
that the first generation really needed.
They did it though. They did it.
Here we have the 13 and a half,
and this one is in their new, fancy sage color.
On the overhead right there, it just looks like gray,
like sort of like apple space gray or something.
In person, it looks green.
IO is also identical in the 13 inch.
So surface connect port 3.5, thunderbolt 4, USB type A.
Excellent.
Thunderbolt is such a game changer for this.
I cannot put into words how much Microsoft
has finally done the thing that was obvious.
Let's go for the 15 first.
A little open.
Oh wow, it logged me right in.
I set this up earlier with a facial recognition
and as you can see it works great.
On their surface devices,
it seems to just work the best with them
like the way that it worked right there.
I just open it up, boom, you're immediately in.
Everything else, it might take
like a half a second or something.
We already opened these up,
but before I can tell you about that,
I need to tell you about this fantastic segue
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Let's have a look at just how these feel.
They fixed it, Brandon.
So the first two generations
of the surface laptop had fantastic build quality.
They were some of the best on the market.
Third and fourth generations were not the same.
That is because the service laptops one and two
were held together using glue.
So if you wanted to take it apart,
you ruined it, you destroyed it.
This is a big problem
because I had a friend that bought a surface laptop too,
and it had a very simple just BIOS failure.
Well, they bought a MacBook afterwards
because they could not fix it
because it was completely unrepairable.
Man, they did a good job on this.
One interesting thing that you can see here
is that it's all aluminum except
for this top portion right here.
So that would be your wifi antennas
cuz those have a lot of trouble going through, you know,
aluminum like this.
Okay, let's do a little tour here.
So this one right here is 2256x1504.
Now one of the annoying things here
is that they haven't really updated.
I was hoping especially after the Surface Book Studio
that they would come out
or Surface Laptop Studio, doesn't matter.
It had a three by two display that was 120 hertz,
and it was fricking awesome.
This right here has not changed at all, I'm pretty sure.
This one right here does have some Dolby stuff
that helps with, you know, correcting for your room,
and how you would be perceiving this stuff.
But this is essentially the same display
that was on surface laptop the first.
There's a lot of things,
like these bezels are pretty big for 2022,
don't really care, it's just a bit annoying.
Brightness is fine, colors are fine,
it's all good but it no longer like wows you,
like it would if it was an OLED display
or a mini LED that'll see your eyeballs or something.
The display on the 15 is very similar,
although, I think it gives you a little bit more resolution.
Excellent displays,
wish the bezels were a bit less bezzly.
Microsoft has some of the best touch screens available.
Just the way that you're able
to move around on it works great.
Actually, now that I think about it.
Everything that you interact with
on these laptops is just fantastic.
The track pad. Excellent.
That said, these days like the one
on the 13 and a half, excellent.
I'm pretty sure they just reuse the hardware
on the 15 which is kind of disappointing.
This could definitely be larger,
like, I have a 14 inch MacBook here.
As you can see,
it's very possible to fit a larger track pad.
I'm guessing that Microsoft just doesn't do
the kind of volume of the 15 inch Surface Laptop
to justify making a whole new skew for this.
Also fantastic, the keyboard.
Across the board on their surface devices,
Microsoft does an excellent job
with the keyboard and it is no exception here.
The Surface Laptop has always had
a fantastic keyboard, although the three
and the four weren't quite as good.
Going back to that whole,
when they switched to having repairability,
the chassis wasn't quite as stiff.
The chassis' stiffness is a huge factor
of how good your keys feel.
How good your keys switches are does not matter at all
if it's gonna be in a squishy chassis.
This right here, they stiffen it up for the number five,
and once again this is among the best on the market.
It's a little bit softer,
so there's like a lot of travel.
It's really nice and soft.
It's also super quiet.
I'll just give you a little listen.
You probably can't even hear it.
Someone's walking up the stairs,
and that's way louder.
For comparison,
these are some of the quietest keys around
but like even that's way louder than the MacBook.
One of the biggest upgrades,
with the fifth generation,
they have new processors.
Wow, who would've thought?
So in here, we have the I7-1255U
which is not the most powerful of processors ever.
You have two P-Cores,
so only two performance cores,
and those ones have the hyper threading
but then you also have eight E-Cores,
which in total, let's have a look at specs here.
Wow, it goes up to 4.7 gigahertz.
So that is still really fast,
and a maximum turbo power 55 watts, damn.
Okay, I wanna run Cinebench on this thing.
I guess the Ryzen 7 1700X,
so 1st Gen gets nearly 9,000,
maybe we'll hope for 8000, 10 Cores, 12 threads.
How are you doing there Microsoft?
3.3 gigahertz.
Not too bad, not too bad.
I was expecting for it to fall off worse actually,
but I guess they only have two performance cores
so it's not like they have a whole lot to cool.
Oh, there we go.
It's falling off now.
2.7 gigahertz, still above the base clock of 2.6.
You can get a much, much faster machine
if that's what you care about for this price.
8,765, so that beat my guess right there.
So that puts us right around a Ryzen 7 1700X.
So that is an eight-core processor and a 1st Gen Ryzen.
Not super fast by today's standard.
It's faster than I7 7700K for everyone
that remembers when that used to be really fast.
What else do we need to do?
Speakers, do you wanna hear some crab rave, Brandon?
So far so good.
Microsoft has done such an excellent job
giving you nice detail and bass
through the keyboard somehow.
(upbeat music)
Not bad, not bad.
Switch it up for the MacBook Pro.
(upbeat music)
The MacBook Pro 14 inch just torches the surface laptop too.
Although one thing that I do have to say
is that the MacBook has a super aggressive
just V curve on their equalizer.
So base is super boosted, treble's super boosted.
It makes it nicer for people that don't know
a whole lot about audio,
but the surface laptop definitely
has a much flatter response.
You can actually hear the MIDS,
and I would guess for video calls and stuff.
Hearing your friends will be easier
on the surface laptop compared to the MacBook.
I guess somewhat surprisingly
but also not all that surprisingly,
these two displays look nearly identical.
That's kind of surprising because Microsoft
advertises 400 Nit Peak brightness for this,
and I think Apple advertises 1600
or something stupid like that
when in practice they don't deliver that
to your eyeballs ever really.
Unsurprisingly, two color accurate displays
beside each other
both just looks like color-accurate displays.
Who would've thought?
Good job Microsoft. (chuckles)
Interestingly, the 15 inch does have a stronger processor.
So here we have the I7 1265U,
1265U has 100 megahertz higher boost clock than the 55U.
Both of them have 16 gigabytes of RAM,
5,200 megahertz,
which means these are not going to be upgradeable.
500 gigabyte SSD from SK Hynix,
and Intel Iris Xe graphics.
Let's give those a little try.
I don't have very high hopes
for the gaming performance of this,
but at the same time, it's not a gaming laptop.
So if we're able to do 1080p-ish low in Valheim.
I will be happy.
This is way better than I expected, honestly.
We're currently running at 60 frames per second,
so this is not quite 1080P.
This is 1440x900P, but we have it on medium-lowish settings,
and we're getting 60 fps.
This is honestly shockingly better than I was expecting.
As long as your expectations are in place,
you can probably do 1080P low gaming and get away with it.
As I said before,
the Windows Hello facial unlock on this is fantastic.
The webcam however is just fine.
Here we go.
This is a perfectly adequate webcam on a laptop.
When the surface laptop first came out,
it blew everything else completely out of the water
and much like everything else
with this laptop, it now is fine to kind of add.
But yeah, this is pretty soft compared
to 1080P that you can get on lots of other laptops now.
So if you wanna do video conferencing and stuff,
this is okay, let's take it apart.
Shut up train.
We're gonna take apart the 15 inch
because I don't like it as much,
and I'm very very curious
if there's just a bunch of space on the inside
that's not being used by anything.
So first of all, thank you Microsoft
for allowing us to get inside of the surface laptops
since the 3rd Gen,
huge improvement over just being glued together.
That said, this is a pretty (beep) way to do it.
We'd have to remove these rubber feet right here
to access the screws.
And when you do that, these rubber feet,
they might go back on, but even if they they do,
they're gonna fall off sometime pretty soon.
This is one of those weird laptops where it comes apart top.
There we go.
Aha, when this pops out,
you have to be incredibly careful
about the little ribbon cable.
You can see maybe right there.
Yeah, if you screw up that ribbon cable,
your track pad and keyboard no longer work, be careful.
This looks very much like the internals
of a 13 inch laptop in a 15 inch laptop.
That said, this little heat shield right here is pretty fun.
I was kind of concerned when I was using
the 13 inch in Valheim there
that my fingers would be getting a bit toasty.
Actual heat sinkage is anemic at best.
Have single heat pipe right here.
That's not a whole lot of cooling.
Also in the 15 inch,
they, without a doubt, could have fit a larger battery
like we just have holes here, bunch of empty space.
And the battery itself is only 45.8 Watt hours.
They advertise 17 hours for this guy
and 18 for the 13 and a half.
You're gonna be lucky to get eight.
And that said, you're gonna be lucky to get anything
because of Windows Modern Standby.
It's actually fucking terrible.
Microsoft, I've complained about this to everyone
for the past year because Windows modern standby
is the worst thing you have done in years,
and that is saying something.
You're losing Windows die hard people here to Mac
because it's so bad.
Anyway, the Surface Laptop 5
is fantastic and I do really like this.
Microsoft has changed just a couple things,
specifically Thunderbolt 4.
Actually, that's like the only thing that they did,
but that's all they had to do
for like the past five generations.
It has a fantastic display.
It's nice and light,
three by two. Love it.
I do wish that this had Alcantara.
That is an option still,
but I just like how smooth and soft the Alcantara is.
Keyboard's great, track pad's great,
screen's great, touch screen.
You don't get that on a Mac.
It starts at a thousand dollars, which don't buy that one.
Eight gigabytes of RAM, 256 gigabyte SSD.
For that price, get something with 16 Gigabytes of RAM
or buy something that's on sale.
The first one that I would recommend is $1,500.
That's kind of rough.
So that gets you an i5, 16 Gigabytes of RAM,
and a 512 Gigabyte SSD.
As tested, this one right here is $1,700,
and that is pretty steep.
Like the surface laptops have always been pretty steep.
It's a premium device, it feels really good.
I can understand it.
It's lots in between the MacBook Pro 13 inch
and the 14 inch, which makes sense.
13 and a half inch right here.
I really like it.
Just fix your stupid battery life.
Anyway, if you like this video,
hit like, get subscribed
and just have a fantastic day, see you later.