the question we're gonna answer today if you own a surface laptop is the surface
laptop - worth the upgrade Microsoft recently launched the surface laptop -
and we've just finished our review it's the successor to the surface laptop one
which has introduced a year ago now if you're looking at both of these you'd be
hard-pressed to tell a difference because they're almost exactly the same
machine let's go through the specs so this is the same machine as far as
dimensions are concerned the weights exactly the same 2.80 pounds the screens
the same 220 256 by 1580 stretching across thirteen and a half inches and
the battery life is the same as well what's different is two things one there
is the very nice black color which i think is actually a synthetic leaked
white praising we were talking about this before the burgundy is nice as well
but the black adds up sort of that added sort of bit of style to it all and then
there's an eighth-generation core processor inside this there is the Core
i5 8250 U which is a KB link our product
now if we look at the ports they are essentially the same and what we had
previously on the surface laptop or a service Ridge '''l service laptop is we
had the original surface connector and then we had USB a a mini display port
and a headphone jack that's fine for right now in fact many peripherals right
now including an older hard drives are still on USB type a but the surface
laptop and the surface laptop 2 are designed for students and you can
imagine that a student's going to be using this over the course of two or
three or four years so one of the port's they have left out becomes a little bit
more crucial and that's USB see you'll find that on many other devices at this
point in time yes USB C does require a dongle to go ahead and connect to older
devices but it's a forward-looking port and you can imagine that over time there
are going to be more and more peripherals being manufactured as
standard the other thing that the you lose with the surface laptop both the
first generation and generation is a microSD slot that is
restricted to the surface pro tablet line and again if your pictures are
going straight from your phone in the cloud you might not miss it but if you
have a an SLR or something of that sort you want to go ahead and transfer photos
manually you might want to have to find a dongle we're up for another machine
let's address the performance issue now if we look at the first generation and
the second generation on certain tests they are almost identical on certain
tests there's a great gap between the two of them Microsoft recently
introduced the October 2018 update and we run tests three times on the first
two tests we happen to get the older update the march of the April update on
the third test Microsoft actually forced the update to the October 2018 update
this is only significant because scores dropped on this by about seven percent
on the older PC mark test those measure home and office in a work environment
and if you're looking strictly at the result of those tests this is actually
this faster machine slightly again probably indicative of some concerns
with PC mark but also some indications that the two machines are fairly close
together however if we look at the more in-depth and synthesized benchmarks we
see a greater disparity Cinebench for example 71 percent difference between
this and this that shows that when you're talking about computationally
intensive tasks this is really the machine to choose from handbrake which
is a video transcoding test we use that to transcoding Hollywood length movie
into a format that can be used in an android tablet and this was actually 39
percent faster if you look at 3d graphics again seventh generation eighth
generation we're seeing a 21 percent difference can you play games in this
the answer is yes depending upon what you're playing you don't want to go
ahead and use try to force something like Call of Duty but if you're talking
about League of Legends or something that's where this will just run this
will run just fine now the other thing that really differentiates the surface
laptop line and reason that we really love the first
generation machine was battery life and for that machine you got over 10 hours
other difference we have in between the first and second generation machines we
haven't talked about is the fact that the first generation machine used
Windows 10s or Windows 10 and s mode this goes strictly to Windows 10 home or
if you opt for a business environments Windows 10 Pro Windows 10s actually
added about an hour to battery life on this and really helped it but if you
compare the two using Windows 10 home again actually what you saw and someone
surprisingly is that this actually outclassed this in terms of battery life
there's a reason for that the battery sizes are essentially the same 42 watt
hours however we kind of got a bit of a cherry pick machine here and that the
actual battery size was about 44 almost 45 watt hours where this was
actually 42 so in terms of battery life again about 10 hours this happened to be
a little bit more expect about 10 hours of total battery life our other machine
what it boils down to is this again are you should you if you have a surface
laptop opted for the service laptop - I would say no if you already own a
surface laptop the performance is probably close enough for the tasks that
you're doing that you don't need to pay extra for this machine we should also
mention at the price as well this happens to be a machine that cost 999
dollars for the minimum price what this machine was actually tested at was
$12.99 this off charges about $200 for the black version part of that is taken
up by the fact that the minimum amount of capacity amount of storage for this
is 128 gigabytes this particular black version is only offered in 256 gigabytes
so you're getting a little bit more for your money again though you're paying a
little bit just for the premium of having an athletically pleasing mobile
in a surface laptop I thought the original service laptop was an excellent
machine the problem is Microsoft had
opted to simply tweak the surface laptop and create the surface laptop to its
competitors have not they've aggressively forged ahead and in fact I
would actually recommend a couple of machines over the surface laptop -
there's the HP spectre x360 13 T and then there's the most recent Dell XPS
which is the 9370 which was released in late 2017 the late 2017 dell XPS
really embraces USBC again you'll have to have a dog little go ahead and
connect an older devices the HP Spectre is a little bit less performant a little
bit less has a little bit less horsepower under the hood
however again we're in the same ballpark the battery life is excellent for both
machines and the prices are great as well HP especially during the holidays
was really taking their price of their 360 down by quite a bit so what do I
think of the surface laptop - it's a great machine it's a good machine it's a
solid machine but if you're looking for the best machine you have to look
elsewhere