Microsoft brought the Surface Laptop’s build quality and features down to a more affordable price point and a few strategic compromises.
Surface Laptop Go: Micosoft’s New Surface Notebook Targeted At Value Lots of HotHardware readers love to learn about, look at, and experience high-end portable PCs with their sturdy build quality, luxurious materials, and high-end specs, but not everyone has the budget to buy one for themselves. An interesting subgenre of premium ultra-portable PCs is the upscale Chromebook, like Google’s Pixelbook Go or Samsung’s Galaxy Chromebook. Those machines have some gorgeous hardware with nice-enough specs, but can’t run Windows apps. What if there was a premium middle ground with good performance at an attractive price? That’s right where Microsoft has aimed its Surface Laptop Go First and foremost, the new Surface Laptop Go is a Windows PC with a variety of performance and price points that should fit many midrange laptop consumer’s budgets. The recipe is fairly simple: Intel’s 10th Generation Core i5 processors, enough RAM and storage to get the job done, wrapped in a lightweight anodized aluminum enclosure. Sprinkle in a dash of Windows 10, season with enough connectivity to taste, and bake until golden sandstone brown, platinum, or ice blue. Let’s meet the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Go… First thing’s first: the Surface Laptop Go starts at a very attractive $549 price point. This actually undercuts the Pixelbook Go’s $649 price tag while potentially delivering slightly better performance. The Surface Laptop Go has an Ice Lake -based Core i5-1035G1, which Intel fabss on its 10nm process with four cores, eight hardware threads via Hyper Threading, and 6 MB of L3 cache. The base clock might be a pokey 1GHz, but as long as cooling holds out, it turbos up much faster at 3.6GHz max boost. It seems like AMD might have been a good option for a budget notebook like this, but Microsoft disagreed. In a pre-review meeting with the Surface team, we asked if a Ryzen-based version might be in the works. Senior Director of Product Management Jochen Siegl noted that the team focused on an Intel processor because the Core i5-1035G1 “has the right performance” for the product. Even though Renoir processors are speedy, it seems that the company favored single-threaded performance with “good enough” graphics over Renoir’s higher core-count/threading advantage and Radeon integrated GPU. Okay then, let’s move on. Storage in the Surface Laptop Go is an interesting compromise. To hit its low $549 price point, the base model has a 64 GB eMMC flash controller and 4 GB of system LPDDR4x RAM. That’s adequate for a Chromebook competitor but won’t set any land speed records. On the other hand, a mere $150 will double both the base memory and storage, along with upgrade the primary storage interface to an NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 controller. For $699, we think that’s a worthwhile upgrade for anybody who wants to store more than few files on the device or dip into light duty content creation work perhaps. At the high end, the extra $200 to upgrade from 128GB to 256GB of storage feels like a lot less value by comparison. That doesn’t buy any additional RAM or anything else—just double the storage, a cost per GB not even Apple charges these days. Once we get past the memory and storage, every version of the Surface Laptop Go has basically the same specs from the Core i5 on down to the aluminum exterior. The system comes built into a really nice-feeling anodized aluminum frame in one of three colors. Our review unit is decked out in Ice Blue, but Sandstone Brown and Platinum are also options. The Surface Laptop Go feels quite small, owing to its 12.
