Microsoft Surface Laptop Go review: Affordable on-the-go machine

Note: This review was first published on 23 Apr 2021.

Wait, what? Another Surface series?

Microsoft has been churning out Surface devices since 2012, and from the single Surface product SKU in its early years, they have forked out to offer a diverse series of devices. Before we delve into what the Surface Laptop Go is about, here’s a rough timeline of how the Surface family has evolved (excluding the B2B-targeted series):

• Surface: Their first ARM-based convertible, which ended in its third iteration (the Surface 3) that adopted an Intel x86  Atom processor and ran Windows 8.1 natively.
• Surface Pro: This is their mainstay series of detachable notebooks for mainstream power users and office usage. It is has endured well since the first edition and is now in its seventh iteration. There's now a Surface Pro 7+ for business and schools that run with more updated hardware than the version sold for consumers.
• Surface Laptop: For those not looking to take advantage of the Surface Pro's flexibility and would rather have a standard laptop for schooling or at work, the Surface Laptop was born out of increasing the stable of options put out by Microsoft, without the heavier price point of the Surface Pro (and the Surface Book). It's now in its third iteration, its most polished version to date.
• Surface Book: The company's high -performance range of convertible notebooks with discrete graphics options (which are often overpriced).
• Surface Go: A compact, ultra-low-powered and ‘budget’ version of Surface Pro. It's basically a tablet running Windows OS and made to look like an affordable Surface Pro when opting for the keyboard cover add-on. This series started in 2018, which we're reviewed, and had a small update in 2020.

With so many models, it would seem Microsoft has every computing need covered - until they probably realised the Surface Go with its low powered processor was delivering more of a Windows on a tablet experience than as a serious notebook consideration for those on a budget. 

To remedy what the Surface Go couldn't fulfil, the Surface Laptop Go was launched in late 2020 to offer a better entry-level, thin and light notebook offering in a standard notebook form factor with just a single processor choice to simply its positioning:-

Powered by the 10th-gen Intel Core i5-1035G1 (Ice Lake) quad-core processor, the Surface Laptop Go comes in 4/8GB RAM and 64GB eMMC drive/128GB SSD/256GB SSD configurations. Select models also offer a power button with an embedded fingerprint sensor for a One Touch sign-in experience via Windows Hello.

Clearly, the device sits right between the specs of a Surface Go and that of a full-fledged Surface Laptop, hence the aptly named Surface Laptop Go nomenclature.

While the new Surface Laptop Go seems like a more powerful notebook of choice for basic productivity needs, its larger 12.45-inch PixelSense Display packs a lower resolution screen than the Surface Go or Surface Laptop. Let's explore how this new offering from Microsoft stands up and is the reduced screen resolution of any concern.

Design and Features

At first glance, it looks like it has more in common to the regular Surface Laptop series, whilst in fact, it has become slightly smaller. Measuring at 278 x 206 x 15.69mm, it is a few centimetres smaller than the Laptop counterparts, partially due to its reduced screen size. It is, however, substantially thicker than the Laptop series (14.5mm) and other recent similar offerings, such as the ASUS ZenBook 14 Ultralight (14.9mm). It weighs 1.1kg, which is not the lightest ultraportable you can get in the market, but at its price range of S$868 - S$1,388, it is one of the lightest in its class.

Like the Laptop series, the Laptop Go offers Microsoft's iconic tri-colour options, Ice Blue, Sandstone, and Platinum. The review unit that I have is of the Platinum variant. The base is made of polycarbonate, whilst the top case and keyboard surface use aluminium. Unlike the Laptop series, there is no Alcantara finish for the keyboard, a soft microfibre-like material used on the keyboards of some Surface devices. As such, the keyboard and palm rest area is a bare metal finish that looks good and is easier to maintain even if it might feel colder to the touch. While the polycarbonate base makes the Surface Laptop Go feel rather ordinary while clutching and handling it, thankfully, the aluminium finish on the top side adds a premium feel to the device. 

As mentioned earlier, the Surface Laptop Go comes with a 12.45-inch PixelSense touchscreen with pretty slim bezels that I almost had to question where the 720p webcam went (which is fortunately present within the top bezel of the display). The “Go” -ness of the Laptop Go is in its native screen resolution of 1,536 x 1,024 pixels, yielding a pixel density of just 148 PPI. This resolution is not Full HD (2K res) and a far cry from the Laptop 3 series sporting a larger and higher pixel density screen with 2,496 x 1,664 pixels (or 201 PPI). Even the tablet-like Surface Go 2 sports a higher resolution screen (1,920 x 1,280 pixels). Despite that, the screen on the Surface Laptop Go still looks brilliant and beautiful, no doubt thanks to the PixelSense screen technology. So if you aren't a stickler for scrutinising details, you'll have no issues working with this screen. Besides, don't forget that its screen size is sub-13-inch.

Following its other Surface brothers, this new variant also follows a 3:2 screen aspect ratio, which translates to more vertical screen space, perfect for browsing (like your social media feeds), reading (our forums perhaps?) and many office-oriented tasks. 

Unfortunately, one drawback of the Laptop Go’s screen, in comparison to its counterparts in other series, is the lack of support for the Microsoft Surface Pen. Now we can't quite put a finger on why this decision was made. If it is about costs - the cheaper Surface Go series supports it. If it is about forgoing such a feature for a traditional laptop build - the Surface Laptop series supports it. As such, it is perplexing as to why a small, but useful feature is left out of the Laptop Go model that would better differentiate itself from options in the non-Microsoft stable.

Keeping in the spirit of maintaining a minimal look on their Surface devices, the Surface Laptop Go comes with bare minimum port options. On the left side of the device, you'll find 1x USB 3.1 Type-A port, 1x USB Type-C port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, while a Surface Connect port sits on the right side… and that is all. For more ports or HDMI connectivity, get a USB-C dongle or a S$388 Surface Dock 2 that uses the Surface Connect port to offer six USB ports and a Gigabit LAN port. Further to these, the Surface Laptop Go supports the latest wireless connectivity standards like Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 for more options.

Just like many of its latest Surface offerings, the Surface Laptop Go can be charged either with the Surface Connect port (the default supplied charger), or through the USB-C port using USB Power Delivery (PD) compatible chargers. This is very useful in a scenario like mine where my house, office, and car are strewn with USB-PD chargers (at my own cost no less), and hence having the option to charge through USB-C is very helpful. Not to mention, reduce the need to buy, manage or carry separate chargers and cables for different devices.

Keyboard and Trackpad

The keyboard is a full-size Chiclet-style keyboard with 1.3mm key travel. At first glance, it looks like every other Surface keyboard. Looking closer at the top row, however, and you would see that it differs slightly from other Surface keyboards. For one, there is a “Find” key residing with the F1 key instead of the keyboard backlight key because the Surface Laptop Go lacks this feature. Next, the power button looks different because it also doubles up as a fingerprint reader for Microsoft’s Windows Hello login.

The trackpad is generously large for a device of its size and ample for daily use, just like the other recent Surface devices and Apple’s Macbook. It measures 115 x 76.66mm and supports five-point multitouch gestures.

Windows 10 S mode (and disabling it)

Microsoft ships the “S” mode of Windows 10 out of every Go-branded device, and the Surface Laptop Go is no exception. We briefly covered the Windows 10 S mode in our Surface Go review. Basically, S mode is a locked-down version of Windows, in which one can only install apps via the Microsoft Store, and you cannot run command-line tools and other power user functions. Whilst we would like to see how the battery performance is like in S mode vis-a-vis in normal mode, we have determined in the previous Surface Go review that there is a negligible difference. Also, we needed to exit S mode in order to install our required benchmarks and various real-life productivity tools. Hence, right after exploring S mode limitations, we switched out of S mode.

Note that switching out of S mode is a one-way process, and once exited, you can never return back to S mode but trust us, you will never see the need to return back to S mode once you exit it. How do you make this change? Just go to System, and find “change product key to Windows 10 Home/Pro”.

While the overall Windows experience on the Laptop Go is the same as other Surface devices, one major difference is the use of fingerprint as a way of biometric authentication for Windows Hello. Whilst not entirely novel across all Windows machines, Surface Laptop Go is the first Surface device that eschews facial recognition in favour of fingerprint authentication. It is a welcomed change, especially in this pandemic, mask-wearing era.

Performance

The Surface Laptop Go is powered by Intel’s 10th generation Ice Lake Core i5-1035G1 processor - which is pretty much an entry-level quad-core part. The review unit we had is comfortably specced with 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and 256GB SSD storage - the highest consumer configuration that costs S$1,388 for the Surface Laptop Go, but the results will also pretty much be identical to the S$1,088 variant that has half the SSD storage.

Noting that Microsoft has positioned the Laptop Go as an low-cost ultraportable laptop, we struggled to find another recently released device that we have reviewed that is of similar dimensions, weight and even configuration. It's rare that we get low-end Core i5 specced system to test. As such, we've put together the next best set of comparisons - full fledged ultraportable notebooks that we've tested, some of which are priced as low as just S$1.4k such as the AMD-powered ASUS Zenbook 14 UM433 and another 10th-gen Ice Lake powered ASUS Zenbook 14 UX425, albeit these are higher specced Core i7 variants. Also note that these comparison devices are larger 14-inch brothers while the Laptop Go sports a more compact 12.45-inch screen. 

Given that we are dealing with ultraportables, I have decided to throw in my own 2-year-old Macbook 12-inch, for Cinebench and WebXPRT benchmarks. Check out our full set of results obtained:-

While the results don't look great for the Surface Laptop Go, its limitation is squarely down to the processing subsystem it's endowed with and any other notebook specced similarly would likely cough up similar results if you are aware of the pecking order of the processors used.

That said, we do have a price-compatible fight when considering that the larger and more polished ASUS Zenbook 14 UM433 ultraportable puts out nearly double the performance results of the Surface Laptop Go. Clearly, the Microsoft Laptop Go is not meant for medium-heavy use, but as we will find out later, it's still sufficiently equipped to tackle many day-to-day tasks, and even some software development.

The question you would have to ask yourself is if you need a more compact laptop and if you're okay to dish out an equivalent amount of cash as the larger and more capable counterpart.

Battery life performance

Note: Battery tests were conducted using PCMark 10's battery benchmark with display set to 100% brightness. For more details on how this benchmark works and why it was chosen, we have a standalone article.

Microsoft claims that its 39.7Wh battery can support up to 13 hours of typical usage, though it is footnoted that this 13-hour claim is derived using a mixture of active use and standby. In HardwareZone, we have chosen to use PCMark 10’s battery benchmark as our test case to mimick certain aspects of real-work usage. Our battery test outcome reflected a modest battery life of just over five hours under the Modern Office battery workload, and 1 hour 31 minutes in the Gaming workload. This is still reasonable, considering that the power consumption is one of the lowest amongst all the other devices benchmarked against, which also helped it rank well in our Portability Ratio index when factoring the device weight, size, volume against battery uptime. 

What about matters pertaining to charging? Microsoft claims that recharging the battery from 0 to 80% takes about an hour. To test that claim, we tried charging using different methods:-

• Using the 40W Surface Connect charger
• Using USB-C charging when connected to an 87W Apple Macbook Charger
• Using USB-C charging when connected to 30W Anker PowerPort Atom PD 1

During our initial tests, we also found out that if you are using the 40W Surface Connect charger or a higher-powered USB-C PD charger, it is important to leave the machine on, in order to hit the maximum charging rate. It is noted that even if a higher wattage USB-C PD charger is used, the maximum power drawn will always be limited to 20W. Only by using the Surface Connect charger, will you be able to hit a power draw of 27W on average. Unfortunately, none of these above connection methods was able to really charge from 0 to 80% in an hour; even the Surface Connect route took about 1.5 hours before reaching the 80% charge mark.

Some real-world usage tests

For laptops, I value portability immensely. To drive home this point, my on-the-go laptop is the 920g Apple Macbook 12, and I use it for mainly software development, and of course word processing. As such, to determine if Surface Laptop Go can truly be called an ultraportable, I subjected the Laptop Go to a few of my real-world tests.

The Bag test

For convenience, I use a Pacsafe Crossbody as my tech bag, in which Surface Laptop Go fits comfortably, without inducing a backache whenever I carry the bag. For comparison sake, an Apple Macbook Pro 13-inch almost can't fit into this crossbody, and is a huge deadweight. As such, the Surface Laptop Go passes the bag test handily, underscoring the compact and portable nature of the device, even if it can't perform on a par with regular-sized notebook at the same price. Yet, it's not as helpless as a Surface Go product and it has just enough chops to pull through basic productivity and creativity tasks with ease.

 

The Cafe test

In lieu of a cafe outing during my time with the laptop, I conducted the 'cafe test' in temporary co-working spaces provided by hotels, whereby the scenario is similar to a cafe in that it's difficult to find a power socket. Two types of tasks were undertaken - one to write this review using Microsoft Word, then Google Docs, and to do some simple software development (Python, NodeJS, React) on the Surface Laptop Go, using Visual Studio Code as a code editor. Both Docker and consequently Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) were turned on throughout.

I managed to work through my review for about 2 hours before the battery dipped from 100% to  77%, and for software development, it depleted to about 61%. Not too bad.

 

Software development, media editing test

One rather bad experience I had with ultra-low-power chips is that the system simply cannot cope with Android app development, nor can they deal with the demands of Docker. Amazingly, even though Surface Laptop Go is powered by an Intel 10th-gen Core Ice Lake processor with quad cores, a chip geared towards low-power usage, I found development to be mostly snappy, though there may be slowdowns when developing for Android initially.

Photoshop and Lightroom apps work fine on the Surface Laptop Go - for the spec I was loaned. I don't think I can say the same for the base model that's endowed with only 4GB of RAM and uses eMMC storage.

It must be noted that the Surface Laptop Go's cooling system incorporates a fan, which is why it can probably sustain peak loads better than fanless counterparts.

Conclusion

The Surface Laptop Go finally satisfies customers that find it hard to pay a premium price for the regular Surface Laptop, while also satisfying their need for a more powerful machine as compared to a very low-powered (and much smaller screen) Surface Go. Even though the screen may not be Full HD equivalent, it's still decent to use and we didn't find it a drawback, plus at the same time, it offers much better portability than other full-fledged Surface devices (apart from Go). To recap, here are the configurations and prices for Surface Laptop Go, noting that all of them come with Intel Ice Lake Core i5-1035G1 processor:-

• 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC: $868
• 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD: $1088
• 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD: $1388
• (a 16GB RAM configuration exists, but it's part of a business systems bundle and software options)

Whilst the price point for the entry-level option may seem tempting, we advise readers to reconsider, as eMMC storage is slow, and 8GB RAM is the absolute minimum baseline for modern machines to enjoy decent productivity without slowdowns. This means the most optimal SKU would be the 8GB/128GB variant at S$1088.  128GB storage is usable if you don't plan to stuff the machine with too many applications or large work files, and you plan to use cloud storage or external storage options to augment the system. However, if that's not something you can easily live by, you might want to pony up for the 8GB/256GB variant for much more ample storage and that will cost you $1,388.

While you can make a case that $1,388 can get you a far more powerful laptop plainly by raw specs, such as the ASUS Zenbook UM433, it must be noted it comes with trade-offs in portability, lack of touchscreen functionality, and lack of USB-C PD charging capability. However, and interestingly, the competition for the Surface Laptop Go isn't from other brands, but it's within Microsoft's own Surface Laptop 3 13.5-inch option that starts from S$1,488 (though that's with 128GB storage), comes with a touchscreen and has a speedier Core i5 processor. There's also the Surface Pro 7, which's more similarly sized to the Surface Laptop Go, has a faster Core i5 processor and obviously, it is touchscreen-enabled for S$1,388 (but without the keyboard).

So all said and done, the advantages of the Surface Laptop Go is that it's more compact and is much more affordable than other options. As long you don't really require the extra performance potential and you really just need a simple, no-nonsense traditional laptop (with a touchscreen as a bonus) that can get by with everyday Microsoft applications or cloud applications, and you value portability particularly, the S$1,088 Surface Laptop Go is an easy recommendation. Students can also get 5% off the recommended retail price when making the purchase at the Microsoft Store. 

You can also get it from the following stores:- Best Denki, Challenger, Courts, EpiCentre @ ION Orchard, Gain City, Harvey Norman, Lazada-Microsoft authorised store, Pacific Bookstore, Shopee-Microsoft authorised store.

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