The danger of making anything smaller and cheaper is that you run the risk of making it too small and too cheap. The newest member of the Surface family avoids both traps.
If Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Go looks familiar, that’s no accident. It’s a smaller, cheaper version of its older cousin, the Surface Laptop, which is now in its third iteration. This isn’t a laptop for an extreme power user. Instead, it’s aimed at more casual business and personal use cases, where a high-priced enterprise-class machine would be overkill. The danger of making anything smaller and cheaper is that you run the risk of making it too small and too cheap. After spending a week with the Surface Laptop Go, I can report that it avoids both traps, although I hesitate to recommend the underpowered entry-level configuration. The consumer version of Surface Laptop Go is available in three configurations. By contrast, the full-sized 13.5-inch Surface Laptop 3 starts at $979, and the top configuration checks in at a cool $2400. If you shop at the Microsoft Store for Business or with one of Microsoft’s commercial partners, the entry-level configuration is not available; commercial configurations of Surface Laptop Go include one additional model, with 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage, for $1200. All configurations are available in Platinum; the two configurations with 8 GB of RAM are also available in Ice Blue and Sandstone. One week is not enough time to form a fully measured opinion of a new device, so consider this report a first look rather than a formal review. If you’re familiar with the Surface Laptop 3, this device will seem completely familiar, albeit slightly smaller. The display, for example, is 12.45 inches (measured diagonally), compared to the 13.5 inches of the Surface Laptop 3. The overall package is lighter as well, weighing in at 2.45 lbs (1,110 g) compared to the 2.84 lbs (1,288 g) of the 13.5-inch Surface Laptop. That ever-so-slightly downsized package means an ever-so-slightly compressed keyboard layout as well. The difference is only about 5/8 of an inch from side to side, and the keys themselves are full size. I had no problem adjusting to the layout and typing at full speed. The Precision Touchpad beneath the keyboard is also full size and works as smoothly as it does on other Surface devices.
